Message in a Bottle by Nicholas Sparks Read Free Book Online Page B

and Harvey came running from the back bedroom. He rubbed against her leg, purring softly, and Theresa picked him up and brought him to the refrigerator. She took out a piece of cheese and gave it to Harvey while she stroked his head, grateful that her neighbor Ella had agreed to look after him while she was away. After he finished the cheese, he jumped from her arms and ambled toward the sliding glass doors that led to the back patio. The apartment was stuffy from being closed up, and she slid the doors open to air it out.
    After unpacking her bags and picking up her keys and mail from Ella, she poured herself a glass of wine, went to the stereo, and popped in the John Coltrane CD she had bought. As the sound of jazz filtered through the room, she sorted through the mail. As usual, it was mainly bills, and she put them aside for another time.
    There were eight messages on her recorder when she checked it. Two were from men she had dated in the past, asking her to call if she had a chance. She thought about it briefly, then decided against it. Neither of them was attractive to her, and she didn’t feel like going out just because she had a break in her schedule. She also had calls from her mother and sister, and she made a note to call them sometime this week. There were no calls from Kevin. By now he was rafting and camping with his father somewhere in Arizona.
    Without Kevin, the house seemed strangely silent. It was tidy as well, though, and this somehow made it a little easier. It was nice to come home to a house and only have to clean up after herself once in a while.
    She thought about the two weeks of vacation she still had left this year. She and Kevin would spend some time at the beach because she had promised him they would. But that left another week. She could use it around Christmas, but this year Kevin would be at his father’s, so there didn’t seem to be much point in that. She hated spending Christmas alone—it had always been her favorite holiday—but she didn’t have a choice, and she decided that dwelling on that fact was useless. Maybe she could go to Bermuda or Jamaica or somewhere else in the Caribbean—but then, she didn’t really want to go alone, and she didn’t know who else would go with her. Janet might be able to, but she doubted it. Her three kids kept her busy, and Edward most likely couldn’t get the time off work. Perhaps she could use the week to do the things around the house she had been meaning to do . . . but that seemed like a waste. Who wanted to spend their vacation painting and hanging wallpaper?
    She finally gave up and decided that if nothing exciting came to mind, she would just save it for the following year. Maybe she and Kevin would go to Hawaii for a couple of weeks.
    She got into bed and picked up one of the novels she had started at Cape Cod. She read quickly and without distraction and finished almost a hundred pages before she was tired. At midnight she turned off the light. That night, she dreamed she was walking along a deserted beach, though she didn’t know why.
    *  *  *
    The mail on her desk Monday morning was overwhelming. There were almost two hundred letters there when she arrived, and another fifty arrived later that day with the postman. As soon as she walked into the office, Deanna had pointed proudly at the stack. “See, I told you so,” she had said with a smile.
    Theresa asked that her calls be put on hold, and she started opening the mail right away. Without exception, they were responses to the letter she had published in her column. Most were from women, though a few men wrote in as well, and their uniformity of opinion surprised her. One by one, she read how much they had been touched by the anonymous letter. Many asked if she knew who the writer was, and a few women suggested that if the man was single, they wanted to marry him.
    She discovered that almost every Sunday edition across the country had run the column, and the letters came