Read Twice Loved (copy2) for Free Online Page A

cover his hand with her own, but his did not move.
    “He looks healthy as a horse, and very much alive.”
    She couched her hands in her lap, studying the plate that Dan had filled for her sometime while she was outside. “Yes, he does ... he ... he is.”
    “Was he here long?”
    “Here?” She looked up quickly.
    “Here. In the house.”
    “You know when the  Omega  came in.”
    “No, not exactly. Nobody said a word to me about Rye’s being on board. Funny, isn’t it?”
    Again she covered his hand with hers. “Oh, Dan, nothing is changed ... nothing.”
    He jerked his hand free and spun to his feet, turning his back on her. “Then why do I feel as if the world just dropped out from under my feet?”
    “Dan, please.”
    He turned and took a step nearer. “Dan, please? Please what? Sit here ... at  his  table, in  his  house, with  his—”
    “Dan, stop it!”
    He whirled away again, the words  his wife  echoing through the room as distinctly as if he’d uttered them. Almost everything here was Rye Dalton’s, or had been at one time—people and possessions both. Dan Morgan found himself floundering for a way to accept the fact that his friend was very much alive and had walked in here expecting to reclaim it all.
    From behind, Laura watched as Dan grasped the back of his neck with one hand and dropped his chin onto his chest.
    “Dan, come and sit back down and eat your dinner.”
    His hand fell to his side and he turned to face her. “Laura, I’ve got to get back to the countinghouse. Will you ... are you going to be all right?”
    “Of course.” She rose and accompanied him to the door, where she held his jacket while he slipped it on. She watched as he retrieved his beaver top hat from the tree, but instead of donning it, he brushed his fingertips distractedly along its brim, his back to Laura. Studying his despondent pose, her throat constricted and her fingers twisted into a tight knot.
    Dan took a step toward the open door, halted, drew a deep breath, then spun and clasped her against his chest so hard, the breath swooshed from her lungs. “I’ll see you at supper,” he whispered in a tortured voice, and she nodded against his shoulder before he tore himself away and quickly stepped out the door.
    As Dan Morgan moved down the scallop-shell path in the footsteps of Rye Dalton, it seemed to him that was where he’d been walking all his life.
    When Dan was gone, Laura found tears in her eyes. She went back inside to find she must confront countless objects that bore witness to the curious melding of their three lives. At the trestle table she touched Dan’s fork, which still rested in the unfinished food on his plate, realizing that years ago Rye, too, had eaten with this very fork; he very likely owned it. Distracted, she put away the remainder of the interrupted meal, but still the memories persisted. She closed the doors of the alcove bed, cutting off the sight of the place where Rye Dalton’s son slept at night beside a row of wooden soldiers that had belonged to Dan Morgan as a boy. The humidor beside the wing chair had been a gift to Dan from Rye. The chair itself was one Dan had chosen after marrying Laura, though the cricket stool before it was a piece given to Rye and Laura by some guest at their wedding.
    Almost against her wishes, Laura found herself at the door of the linter room, her eyes moving to the bed—how painful it was to look at it now—where she and Rye had conceived Josh and upon which Josh had been born and where Dan had come to sit beside the new mother and peer into the flannel blankets at the squirming pink bundle and predict, “He’ll look just like Rye.” Laura’s eyelids trembled shut as she remembered Dan’s words and how they’d been spoken because he’d sensed it was what Laura had needed to hear at that moment. This bed, above all, seemed a testimony to their convoluted history. It had been used by all three of them; the pineapple carving on