Read A Valentine for Harlequin's Anniversary for Free Online Page B

mid-70s. Love at first sight. At the time, my mom was married to an alcoholic; Harry and his wife had drifted so far apart there was a chasm between them. Within weeks, both had filed for divorce and moved in together. They married as soon as they could.
    He was raucous and rough-edged, but solid as a rock when it came to his love for my mother. She exasperated him on a daily basis—she had a tendency to borrow his tools, then forget where she left them. But Harry wrote love letters to her, pouring out his heart to her in a way you wouldn’t expect from a scrappy fighter like him. When he was dying of cancer, his only thought was for her. He feared she would pine away without him. She was strong when he died, but it was clear to all of us that this was the love of her life she was saying good-bye to.
    Story three. Cancer struck my mother less than a year later. She fought, took her chemo with courage, traveled a hundred miles to see a specialist in Sacramento. But the cancer got the best of her, roaring through her body until she no longer had the strength to fight it.
    We all gathered around her hospital bed in the last moments. But there was one person missing who needed to say good-bye. My youngest sister. Adopted into the family, she’d always felt a little on the outside of the rest of us. As we stood around the bed, my sister was on her way, racing to be with her mother before the end.
    And Mom waited. She knew what it meant to my sister to be there. My sister walked into the room, touched my mother and said, “I’m here, Mom. You can go now.” Fifteen minutes later, she had breathed her last.
    Leaving behind only her love for us.
    — Karen Sandler
    #30

    I believe in love because love can work miracles.
    For most of my life, I was an involuntary loner. I was different than most of the kids in Middle and High School; I loved to read, wasn’t big on sports or cheering on football games, preferred classical music to rock and was just socially awkward enough to find it difficult to make friends, let alone date like most of my peers.
    For years I dealt with my loneliness by withdrawing further into my books and old movies, living in a world where love was very real to me. And then, one day in my late twenties, I met Serge.
    I “met” him through a fan group devoted to one of my favorite authors, C. J. Cherryh. Serge and I, on opposite ends of the continent, had both been active in the group: Serge by appearing in a masquerade at one of the large World Science Fiction conventions, I by contributing frequently to a “round robin” of what would today be considered “blogs”, in the days before e-mail and the internet.
    I don’t exactly remember what first brought us together: Serge recalls that I’d asked him to buy a few French-language magazines for me (when I was a huge fan of a certain movie actor); I remember that he asked me, as an artist, to illustrate a comic book he wanted to create.
    Whatever the reason, we began to write to each other, I from California, he from Quebec, Canada. The letters (remember, this is pre-e-mail) grew longer and longer, expressing and sharing our innermost thoughts and wishes.
    I clearly remember the moment I knew I was in love with Serge. He had been talking about the wonder of seeing his cat, Sissy, as she lay in a shaft of sunlight in his apartment; the gloss of her fur, the grace of her movements. And I thought, “anyone who can see such things as I do, feel such things as I do…well, he’s the man for me.”
    Naturally, we were both a little scared. But I invited Serge to stay at my parents’ home in Concord, California, from where we would drive together down to Los Angeles for another WorldCon. It would all be entirely chaste, of course, but I was utterly terrified.
    And when I finally met Serge, well…I lost all my certainty. Meeting him for the first time “in person” proved a little daunting for me, and I pulled away, though there was no doubt that we were