Going on with your life after looking for a letter that never came from the one you will always love. Surely he would change his mind after the first letter declaring their relationship was over. Six years of trying to forget yet wondering why you have been left behind, civilian nurse Jenny Bennett continues on the night shift at the Presidio Army base hospital in San Francisco, California. Having honor and achievement in helping injured men readjust to civilian life differently than when they left home, her life is going along smoothly ~ until the day she thought she recognized the voice from her heart. Ryan Gallagher, whom she had met those years ago in the same ward she now attended. But wait. There is a child with him. How could it be her Ryan, the one who won her heart?
Naval Lt. Ryan Gallagher is back from assignment and unable to say where he has been. In the meantime, as the rest of his troop had gone to the Philippines those years ago, he is still spoken of in the ward as a deserter. Valor set aside, he must continue on silently. Can he reclaim his life?
And his daughter ~ little Lily Gallagher is defining a determined will to learn a second language that will benefit her in her future womanhood. So thankful for the times something you think is a small little thing as you do it, actually benefits in the future and prepares you for what is ahead. Strenuous to learn to read and write the language beyond speaking, Lily masters skills set before her.
A child draws closeness in Ryan and a humbled heart to those around her.
To melt a hardened heart... Jenny wondered how deeply the thaw would need be. Forgive abandonment and being set aside?
In this story, the characters each have need to explore their defiance and cause. Loneliness on Ryan's part, missing Jenny? Or, overcome with remembrance of a youth that was snuffed out before time allowed. Secondary characters are supportive and agreeable to find a solution that is amiable to all. For in any life, those surrounding them are affected too by change that has or needs to be made to free them to live a life full of grace and forgiveness. Coming alongside to trust will be a journey ~ desired or not. To be freed from a past that strangles any hope for today if not left to continue forward. Determined, it takes more than one to accomplish a freedom available and tangible in a Love offered freely.
Prologue
U.S. Army
Base at
the
Presidio
San
Francisco, 1898
Jenny Bennett woke as pebbles clattered against her window. She
sat bolt upright, trying to get her bearings. As a hospital nurse,
she was often called upon in the middle of the night, but always
by a knock on her door.
Even as she scrambled from beneath the bedsheets, another
spray of pebbles hit the glass. She dashed to the window, wincing
at the cold tile on her bare feet. Standing by the lamppost below
was the distinctive figure of Lieutenant Ryan Gallagher, his sandy
blond hair glinting in the circle of gaslight. Ryan was the most
straight-laced man she knew, hardly the type to be flinging pebbles
against her window in the dead of night.
She tugged up the window sash. “What’s going on?”
“Can you come down?” Ryan called up in a hoarse whisper,
trying to avoid waking others in the building. Over two hundred
people slept in this army barracks, but only a handful were women.
As a civilian nurse, she was fortunate the army let her lodge here. Otherwise she’d have to make the long cable car journey from the
city each day.
“I’ll be right down.”
April in San Francisco was chilly, so she shrugged into a coat
and tugged on a pair of boots. She finger-combed her straight
black hair, trying to pull it into some semblance of order before
running down to meet Ryan. They’d only known each other for
three months, but she’d been in love with him for two.
A glance at the clock revealed it was three in the morning. What
on earth was Ryan up to at such an hour? She hastened down the
steps, out the door, and straight into the shelter of Ryan’s waiting
arms. She smiled as he lifted her from the ground, holding on tight
as he twirled her around.
“I almost didn’t recognize you in those civilian clothes,” she said
once her feet were on solid ground. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” he assured her, drawing back to gaze into her face.
He seemed unusually somber—sad, even. He was usually in such
good spirits, and his mood worried her. “Let’s go somewhere private,” he whispered.
The Presidio sprawled over three square miles on the northern
tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Most of it was wilderness, but
the western side contained an army base, the hospital, and training facilities. The army used only a fraction of the land. The rest
of it was blanketed with towering pines, eucalyptus groves, and
sycamore trees, making the Presidio feel like a primeval wilderness. The forest also provided plenty of seclusion from the chaos
on base.
Normally the Presidio housed less than a thousand people, but
since President McKinley declared war against Spain, the base
had been mobilizing for conflict. Troops from across the nation
streamed into the Presidio, preparing to sail for the Spanish colonies in the Far East. Thousands of pup tents were scattered like mushrooms across the lawns and parade fields to shelter the newly
arrived soldiers.
Jenny followed Ryan on a meandering path through the tents,
still confused by his strange behavior. Was he ill again? It had been
three months since the USS
Baltimore
hobbled into port with half
its crew suffering from typhoid. Ryan had been among the stricken,
his case bad enough to hospitalize him for two weeks. He finally
recovered but was still rail-thin.
During his stay in the hospital, Ryan had been consistently
polite, managing a weak smile of gratitude each time she tended
him. His warm brown eyes always softened the instant she came
into view, and he was the kindest man she’d ever met. He read the
Bible before breakfast and murmured a prayer of thanks before
each meal.
She’d started calling him Galahad, partly because it was similar
to his last name, but mostly because it was how he seemed to her.
She secretly gave lots of her patients nicknames: Bossy Man, the
Weeper, the Nice Texan, the Rude Texan .
. . but from the moment
she met Ryan Gallagher, she thought of him as Galahad.
She couldn’t imagine why he’d come to see her at such an unseemly hour. He wasn’t in uniform either, which was out of character. The Presidio was an army base, but since the declaration of
war, the navy had anchored their fleets in the harbor and their
officers had moved into Presidio quarters. Ryan had been one of
those naval officers, looking wickedly handsome in his crisp, white
dress uniform. It wouldn’t be long before the ships set sail for the
Philippines, and already she ached at the thought of Ryan going
to some tropical jungle to fight a war no one understood.
It got darker as they moved into the cool sycamore forest, a
carpet of damp leaves cushioning her footsteps and giving off a
loamy scent. She startled at a sudden cascade of birdcall, odd at
this time of night. She glanced at Ryan with a question in her eyes.
“Night herons,” he whispered. “They forage in the hours before
dawn, always in groups. They’re very social creatures. We must
have surprised them.”
Ryan knew everything about animal and marine life. It was
one of the things she found so attractive about him. Jenny had
spent her entire life in the city, but Ryan courted her with walks
along the seashore that rimmed the Presidio. During those walks
he taught her to see the world with new eyes. He would hunker
down on the beach to show her the underside of a starfish. He
told her about red rock crabs and how they acted like stewards of
the estuary by keeping the bottom of the bay clean. Ryan could
explain the difference between a fungus and an alga. Sometimes
they simply walked in silence, but even then she felt like singing
and laughing at the same time. Ryan touched a part of her soul
she hadn’t even known existed. It had been easy to ignore the war
during those golden afternoons, but it was suddenly all too real.
Ryan pulled her a few feet off the path behind a tree and drew
her into an embrace. “I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said, and it
felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. None of the ships
were leaving until next month, and Ryan wasn’t well enough to
be sent into combat yet. This didn’t make sense.
She pulled back to peer into his face. “Where are you going ?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I couldn’t
leave without saying good-bye.”
She was speechless. They’d just found each other, and now he
was leaving ahead of all the other troops? It seemed impossible
for a man as gentle as Ryan Gallagher to be going to war. He belonged in a college classroom or a church pulpit, not a battlefield.
They had already begun planning a life together. They were going
to buy a saltbox cottage on one of the bluffs north of the city, a
place where they could bask in the purity of the sunlight and clean
ocean breezes.
“Will you write?” she managed to ask.
“I’ll try.”
That seemed odd, too. Above all, the military took extraordinary
measures to ensure mail was delivered to and from their soldiers. It
was one of the few things they could offer to make remote postings
more bearable. Writing should be an easy thing to promise, but
Jenny knew Ryan wouldn’t lie to her.
She grasped his forearms as she tried to memorize each feature
of his handsome face. She didn’t even have a photograph of him.
“Why are they sending you out so early? None of the other men are
leaving until next month. I don’t want them sending you off when
you’re still twenty pounds underweight and could suffer a relapse.”
He smiled gently. “Jenny, I’m fine.”
“You’re letting the navy take advantage of you.” Ryan was so
instinctively generous that he let people exploit his good nature.
She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve a man as gallant as
Ryan Gallagher. She was a girl from the wrong side of San Francisco,
and he was a hero straight out of a storybook.
“I can’t say anything more, but I don’t want you worrying about
me, alright? I’m going to be okay. I might even be home before
Christmas.”
His words were meant to be comforting, but they had the opposite effect. Didn’t people always underestimate the enemy? Ever
since Congress had declared war, soldiers had boasted it would take
only a few weeks to trounce the Spanish, but Jenny wasn’t so sure.
“Ryan, it’s
Spain,” she said, ashamed of the tremble in her voice.
“Spain has been one of the greatest naval empires for centuries.
How can you say it won’t be dangerous? Even crossing the ocean
to the Philippines is dangerous.”
“I haven’t said I’m going to the Philippines.”
Jenny made no answer, but everyone knew the war would
be fought in the Philippines, where Spanish soldiers had been entrenched for three hundred years. Even before the formal declaration of war, the navy began funneling men, munitions, and
ships into the San Francisco harbor for the grand expedition
that would leave next month. Jenny never would have met Ryan
except for this war, but she dreaded the thought of his leaving.
“I’m still worried about you,” she said. “Something about this
doesn’t seem right.”
He touched her cheek, his face radiating warm sympathy. “I
don’t want you worrying over me. As I came to see you, I spotted
a shooting star. Did you know it’s a sign of good luck?” He drew
her into his embrace again, holding her tightly. “Don’t tell anyone
I was here tonight,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s not something
that can get leaked.”
“Of course.” Civilian employees were warned to keep quiet
about all troop movements and activities on the base. It seemed
impossible to believe the Spanish would have planted spies among
them, but she would keep quiet. Suddenly the war felt very real,
and she didn’t want it to. She wanted to go on meeting Ryan on
the quadrangle, having picnics on the cliff overlooking the bay,
and fooling herself into believing their magical interlude would
never end. How long would it be before he held her like this again?
It seemed so unfair. To have finally found someone, only to have
him torn away so quickly.
“Before I go, I want you to know how much I love you,” he
whispered against her cheek, and her heart squeezed. He withdrew
a few inches to gaze down into her face. “As soon as I get back,
we’ll get married and start the rest of our life together. I wish I’d
had a chance to buy a ring, but everything is happening much
faster than I thought.”
This might be the most wonderful and heartbreaking moment
of her entire life. Her heart threatened to split wide open. “That
sounds really good,” she managed to say.
He fumbled in his pocket, then pressed a heavy gold watch into
her hands, the metal still warm from the heat of his body. “At least
take my father’s watch. Something to remember me by.”
“No, Ryan, it’s too much.” She tried to give it back, but his hands
were firm as they closed around hers.
“Keep it safe for me,” he said. “I’ll be back someday with a wedding ring, and then we can trade, okay?”
“I can do that,” she whispered.
“I wish things didn’t have to be this way, but it’s time for me to
go. You won’t see me again until this is all over.”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said. “I don’t care how long you’re
gone, I’ll wait forever.”
For some reason, her declaration seemed to make him sad. A
shadow passed over his face as he pulled her into his arms, rocking
her gently in the moonlight.
“Good-bye, Jenny. I’ll never forget you. No matter where I go,
your heart and spirit will be with me always.”
~*~
Months went by with no news from Ryan. Each day Jenny held
her breath as she approached the post office on the base. Other
people received plenty of letters from the soldiers sent overseas, but
Jenny’s box was always empty. She checked the casualty lists daily,
saying a prayer of relief each time she failed to spot Ryan’s name.
The war didn’t last long. By September it was all over and soldiers
began returning home, but there was still no news from Ryan. As
Christmas came and went, she feared he’d been killed and somehow his name was not recorded on the casualty lists. What if he’d
been captured and trapped in some foreign land where he didn’t
know the language? He could have suffered a relapse of typhoid
or some other tropical disease. Ryan had no family and no one to
sound the alarm that he’d gone missing.
It was impossible to sit by and do nothing, so she wrote to Washington to inquire about a sailor who seemed to have vanished. She
wrote to the Secretary of the War Department and the captain of
the USS
Baltimore. She wrote to Admiral Dewey himself. It came
to nothing, all of them claiming Ryan was deployed and in good
health, but she could not believe it when months went by without
a single letter from him.
It took over a year for the first and only letter she would ever
receive from Ryan to arrive at the Presidio. Jenny stared at it with
disbelieving eyes, but it was short and to the point.
Dear Jenny,
I fear I was too optimistic about our future prospects. I have
been offered an important opportunity with the navy and have
accepted the commission. I will not be returning to California,
but I wish you the very best with whatever your future holds.
I am deeply sorry for any false expectations I may have created during my convalescence at the Presidio.
Sincerely,
Lt. Ryan Gallagher
1
Six Years Later
Summer
1904
Jenny stepped outside the hospital, gazing at the sunrise just beginning to light the horizon. While sunrise signaled the beginning of
the day for most people, for Jenny it meant bedtime.
Civilian nurses had been reassigned to overnight work after the
war ended, and returning soldiers took the desirable day shifts.
Working through the night was a struggle, but it was her only option if she wanted to continue working at the Presidio’s hospital.
It was still chilly, and she drew her heavy woolen cloak tighter.
Normally at this time she returned to her quarters, drew the shades,
and slept until noon.
Not today. Her stomach clenched as she anticipated her meeting with Captain Soames, the medical director for the hospital
at the Presidio. Once a battlefield doctor, Captain Soames had
been working at a desk since the Spanish-American War ended
only eight months after it began. He was a humorless, hard-bitten
man who had little patience for the civilian employees at the base,
but he was the only person who could grant the favor Jenny so
desperately needed.
He wouldn’t be in his office yet, so she made a quick trip to the
barracks where civilian nurses lodged on the top floor. Her room
was compact, tidy, and spotless. It ought to be, given that she swept
it daily and wiped the windows, the mirror, and the hardware with
a mild vinegar solution twice a week.
After scrubbing her face and hands, she changed her collar for a
fresh one. All the nurses wore blue cotton dresses beneath a white
apron and topped with a starched collar the army supplied to them
each week. Jenny paid extra to have a freshly starched collar daily.
Cleanliness was important to her, and any time she locked horns
with Captain Soames, she wanted to look flawless. She shook her
ebony hair free of its pins, brushed it to a high shine, and then
coiled it back into an elegant twist. Pinning the folded nurse’s cap
into place was the last detail before heading to the captain’s office.
He didn’t seemed pleased to see her, even less so when she explained what she wanted, but she pressed on without letting him
shake her composure.
“Skeeter Jones is a bright boy, but unless he has surgery on his
eyes, he will be practically blind within a few years,” she explained.
“And you want the army to pay for it.”
Skeeter was a twelve-year-old orphan who earned less than a
dollar a day selling newspapers, so yes, Jenny needed to find some
-
one willing to pay for it.
“Dr. Samuelson tells me that symblepharon surgery is a routine
procedure that requires less than an hour in the operating room.
I’d be willing to pay any costs associated with medication. . . .”
She let the sentence dangle. Her finances were already stretched
dangerously thin since what happened last month, but Skeeter
needed this operation. A defect in his system was causing the folds
of his eyelids to become anchored to his eyeball, making it hard
to see. A simple incision done by a skilled surgeon would change
the entire course of Skeeter’s life, but it had to be done now, before he grew much older. Operating rooms at the hospital sat vacant
most of the day, and it would cost the army very little to perform
this operation.
“Find some other benefactor to pay for it,” Captain Soames
said. “If it becomes known that the army is treating charity cases,
we’ll have lines stretching to the Embarcadero and complaints
about favoritism.”
“Or it might improve our reputation with the city.”
“Find a way to pay for it, Nurse Bennett. Then maybe I’ll hear
your request.”
“How am I to pay for it when you pay me scarcely half what
you pay the male attendants?”
The captain heard the veiled accusation in her tone. “The night
nurses get paid less because you do little more than babysit sleeping
patients. Of course we aren’t going to pay you the same salary as
the staff during the day. If you don’t like your job here, then quit.
If you aren’t earning what you need, then quit. If you don’t like the
way I run the hospital, then quit. Is that clear, Nurse Bennett?”
She met Captain Soames’s glower with her chin held high. “Quite
clear. The army must be proud their officers can express themselves
so forcefully and without resorting to bothersome courtesy.”
Captain Soames let out a bark of gruff laughter. He’d had a
grudging respect for her since the time he saw her tackle a soldier trying to steal morphine from a supply cabinet. While most
nurses hailed from respectable families, Jenny grew up along San
Francisco’s waterfront and wasn’t intimidated by unruly soldiers.
Although she liked to pretend it didn’t exist, a streetwise toughness
from her youth still lurked just beneath her prim, starched uniform.
Captain Soames threw down his pencil and looked at her in
frustration. “Why don’t you just get married like a normal woman?
Then you won’t have to work six days a week and still scrounge for
money to do a kid a favor.”
Jenny tried not to blanch even though she’d heard the question plenty of times over the years. She’d fallen in love once,
and it had been a disaster. The most humiliating thing was that
even after receiving Ryan Gallagher’s terse letter, she couldn’t
shake free of his memory. Something about it didn’t seem right.
Maybe it was just her reluctance to face the truth, but she feared
something very bad had happened to Ryan and he was trying to
shield her from it.
She had clung to that foolish hope for years, even pressuring her
friend at the payroll office for information on his whereabouts. All
Vivian had been able to tell her was that Ryan’s address had been
kept confidential for his entire career in the military, but she later
learned he had resigned from the navy early last year. His official
forwarding address was now in a tiny fishing village near San Diego.
Jenny could no longer delude herself. As a civilian, Ryan was
completely free to contact her if he wished. San Diego was only a
day’s travel by train, and still she heard nothing from him.
“I have no plans for marriage at this time,” she told Captain
Soames. There had been no one else for her since Ryan, and too
many men had let her down over the years.
Only Simon was different. She and Simon both knew what it
was to be homeless and hungry. Since the day he took her under his
wing when she was a nine-year-old street urchin, they had always
looked out for each other.
The gritty world of San Francisco looked askance at a middle-aged man befriending a pretty young girl, so she’d taken to referring
to Simon as her father from the very beginning. For all intents and
purposes, Simon Bennett
was
her father, the only father she’d ever
known. She even took his last name because “Bennett” sounded
solid and respectable. He fed her when she was hungry, made sure
she went to school every day, and consoled her when kids in the
neighborhood taunted her because they knew where she came from. During the boom years, it was Simon who paid for her to
attend nursing school.
The boom years were long over, and now Simon needed help.
Last month his jewelry shop had been robbed. Thieves kicked in
the plate glass window at the front of his shop and walked away
with all the jewelry, including Simon’s beloved assortment of pearls.
Simon had been collecting and selling pearls his entire life, but
the theft left him broke. He didn’t even have the money to replace
the window and had to nail boards over the opening. Simon’s
landlord had warned he would be evicted if he couldn’t replace
the window within the week.
With no other options, Jenny had sold the watch Ryan gave her
to buy the plate glass window. Guilt had tugged at her conscience
when she laid the watch on the pawn shop counter. It had belonged
to Ryan’s father, a man who worked as a missionary in the Far East.
Both of Ryan’s parents had died before she met him, and she felt
disloyal selling one of the few keepsakes he had from them.
She hardened her heart. If Ryan cared about his father’s watch,
he could have asked her for it. She owed Ryan Gallagher nothing
and Simon everything.
The sale of Ryan’s watch brought enough to install a new window, but it wasn’t going to save Simon’s shop. Jenny had been
funneling all her spare money to help him restock the store, and
it meant she had nothing left to help a boy who was quickly going
blind.
She needed to play her ace card. When Captain Soames was
first appointed to the Presidio, she’d read everything she could find
about him. The details of their childhoods were different, but she
and Captain Soames both shared the same hardscrabble core, and
she knew exactly what it would take to persuade him.
“Your family emigrated from Ireland when you were a baby,” she
said. “You were one of nine children who grew up in the toughest ghetto of New York City. You didn’t have a pair of shoes until you
were eight years old. No one ever handed you anything. You joined
the army at sixteen and your life got even tougher, but the army
gave you the only thing you ever asked for.
A chance. You labored,
sweat, fought, and bled to get where you are .
. . but you weren’t
blind, Captain Soames. You never would have had a fighting chance
in this world if you had been blind.”
Captain Soames glared at her, and she glared right back. This
fight was too important to lose. She waited, counting her heartbeats
while he shifted in his chair.
“Go tell Dr. Samuelson to put the boy’s surgery on the schedule.”
It felt like the sun rose inside her, radiant with light, heat, and
hope. She didn’t let a trace of it show on her face as she nodded.
“Thank you, sir.”
~*~
Jenny usually met Vivian Perez for lunch at one o’clock each
afternoon. There weren’t many female employees at the Presidio,
and Jenny and Vivian quickly bonded amidst the thousands of
male soldiers stationed at the West Coast’s foremost military
base.
Instead of eating at the noisy mess hall, they took their lunch
to a table outside on the quadrangle.
Jenny twirled a tin drinking cup between her palms. “The surgery for Skeeter’s eyes will be in two weeks,” she told Vivian. “I’m
going to ask Simon to let the boy move in with him after the surgery, because the orphanage won’t have the staffing to tend to him.
Of course, I can only hope Simon won’t be evicted before then.”
She sighed as she unwrapped her chicken sandwich on a flaky
croissant roll. She didn’t have much appetite but needed her
strength. Opening her sandwich, she ate the chicken from the
middle and left the croissant untouched.
“What about Simon finding some kind of paid work?” Vivian
asked as she tucked into her own sandwich.
It would be the easiest solution to their problem. Getting Simon a
respectable job somewhere would be practical, efficient, and logical.
Sadly, none of those adjectives could be applied to Simon Bennett.
“I would have better luck rerouting the path of the sun than
getting Simon to behave logically,” she said, unable to keep the
trace of fondness from her voice. It was the erratic income Simon
earned during her childhood that inspired Jenny to go into nursing.
Nursing was a practical skill that would always be needed. People
got sick in times of plenty and when the bottom dropped out of
the economy. Hospitals could be depended on to pay their wages
on time, and she appreciated the steady income.
She leaned her elbows on the table and let the breeze caress her
face. She liked this spot because it carried the scent from a nearby
patch of eucalyptus shrubs. It was a clean smell. Fresh and crisp.
Sometimes she snipped a few twigs to take to her room.
“I wonder what that girl is doing?” Vivian asked, and Jenny
followed her friend’s gaze.
A few yards away, a little girl in a white smock tugged at a heavy
stone bordering the rose garden. She couldn’t have been more
than three or four years old, and the rock was almost as big as she
was. This didn’t stop the girl from giving it her all, tugging with
her weight.
The child seemed to be alone. Jenny doubted the girl could
budge that rock, but it was best to be safe. She rose and approached
the child, whose straight black hair had slipped free of its hair clips
to obscure her face.
“Are you all alone out here?” Jenny asked.
The girl straightened. She was a beautiful child with distinctively Asian features. There were plenty of Chinese people in San
Francisco, but Jenny rarely saw them at the Presidio.
“Papa told me to play here,” the girl said in a lightly accented
voice. Jenny wondered if Papa knew his daughter was wallowing
in garden mulch while wearing a clean white frock.
“Come join us at the table until your father gets back,” Jenny
prompted, and the girl obediently followed the few steps to the
table beneath the cottonwood tree. “Are you hungry? Would you
like a bit of croissant?”
The girl looked confused as she studied the croissant. “Bread?”
she asked.
“Yes, it’s bread.”
“Yes please, ma’am.” The child swiped at her hair, and a barrette
slipped even further, barely hanging on to her silky black strands.
“Come, let me fix your hair,” Jenny said. “Your papa won’t like
it if you lose those pretty seed pearl barrettes.”
There was quite an industry in mechanically grinding oyster
shells to make seed pearls, so they weren’t terribly expensive, but
Simon would have a heart attack if he saw a child carelessly lose a
pair of seed pearl hairpins while playing in the dirt. The child let
Jenny finger-comb her hair, but it was a challenge to get the clips
securely anchored in the slippery strands.
Her name was Lily, and once she began chattering, it was impossible to stop her. Lily told them she had two pet cats at home, one
of which killed a jellyfish and brought it into their house, which
made her papa laugh so hard he had tears on his face. Her papa
owned an entire beach, and he had a fancy uniform that sometimes
he wore and sometimes he didn’t.
“Lily?” A man’s voice called from base headquarters on the other
side of the quad.
“Papa!” Lily hopped off the bench and went tearing across the
quadrangle toward a tall man in a crisp, white naval uniform.
Jenny stared, not trusting her eyes. “Ryan?” she whispered.
He was too far away to tell, but the man reminded her of Ryan Gallagher. Maybe it was just the navy uniform, when almost everyone
else at the Presidio was in the army, but he looked so similar to Ryan
it awakened a rush of bittersweet longing.
Without conscious thought she stood and started walking
toward him. She’d only gone a few steps when the child reached
him. The naval officer squatted down to scoop her up, tossing the
girl into the air with a hearty laugh.
She knew that laugh, a golden tenor that came straight from
the heart. It was him. It had to be. While she stood mute and
motionless, the little girl looked over her father’s shoulder and
waved good-bye. The man followed his daughter’s gaze and glanced
back at Jenny.
He froze as if spellbound. There was no doubt.
Ryan Gallagher was back.
Before she could take another step, Ryan hoisted Lily higher
into his arms, turned the other way, and set off toward the officers’
quarters without a backward glance.
“Jenny?” Vivian asked. “What’s going on?”
It took a while to find her breath. “That man reminds me of
someone I once knew.”
“Ryan Gallagher?” During her brief courtship, Jenny had breathlessly relayed all the details of her whirlwind romance to her friend.
It had been painful and embarrassing when she had to tell Vivian
that Ryan changed his mind and they wouldn’t be getting married after all.
She didn’t want to reopen that painful chapter and shook her
head.
“He’s nobody,” she said simply.
Elizabeth Camden, To the Farthest Shores
Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2017. Used by permission
. This review was written in my own words. No other compensation was received.***
by Karen Witemeyer, Jody Hedlund, and Elizabeth Camden ~ releases September 5, 2017 by Bethany House Publishers.
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Chautona Havig lives and writes in California’s Mojave Desert with her husband and five of her nine children. Through her novels, she hopes to encourage Christians in their walk with Jesus.
Meet author Melissa Jagears as she shares her writings of this second novel in her Teaville Moral Society series.
