07 The Guardian by Nicholas Sparks

Author:Nicholas Sparks [Sparks, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Julie was still shaking when she got in the car with Mike a few minutes later. A nap was out of the question now, of course; there wasn’t a chance she was going to sleep. And there wasn’t the remotest possibility that she was going to stay at her house alone while Mike went to the Clipper. Mike had offered to back out of the show, but she didn’t want him to, sure that they would just sit around home rehashing the fear all night long. No need to relive the suffocating terror.

No, what she needed was an escape. A night on the town, some loud music, and a few more beers and she’d be good as new. Back to the same old me, she thought.

As if that’s going to be possible, the little voice inside her said skeptically.

Julie frowned. Okay, so it probably wasn’t going to work, but obsessing about it certainly wouldn’t work. And she was not going to stay home. And she was not going to think about it, she told herself, other than to figure out just what she was going to do from here on.

She’d always believed that people come in two varieties: those who look out the windshield and those who stare in the rearview mirror. She’d always been the windshield type: Gotta focus on the future, not the past, because that’s the only part that’s still up for grabs. Mom throws me out? Gotta get some food and find a place to sleep. Husband dies? Gotta keep working, or I’ll end up going crazy. Got some guy stalking me? Gotta figure out a way to stop it.

In the car with Mike, she steeled herself. Julie Barenson, she thought, a take-charge kind of gal.

The puffing up worked for a moment before her shoulders sagged. Yeah, right, she thought. It wasn’t going to be that easy this time, because this little scenario wasn’t finished yet, and the future’s kind of hard to concentrate on when the past isn’t quite done. Right now, she was stuck in the present, and it wasn’t a good feeling at all. Despite the brave act she was putting on, she was scared, even more scared than when she’d been living on the streets. There, she’d been able to find a way to stay invisible—survival by hiding, she’d called it, which was pretty much the opposite of what was happening with Richard. The problem now was that she was too visible, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

When Mike parked on the street in front of his place, she found herself looking over her shoulder and straining to hear anything out of the ordinary. The darkened spaces between the houses didn’t do much for her nerves; nor did the rustling, which turned out to be a stray cat poking through the garbage.

And the questions that plagued her—oh, those were doozies for the nerves, weren’t they?What did he want? What was he going to do next? For a moment she imagined

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