“I don’t think I mentioned how beautiful you look,” he said.

A faint-pink flush spread across her cheeks, but she shook her head at him and smiled.

“Thank you. You certainly know how to make a woman forget about the purple bruise on her face.”

“What bruise? I don’t see a bruise,” Sully said, then winked as he started the car.

With Melissa pointing out the way, they soon arrived at the library.

“This is nice,” Sully said as he parked beneath the shade of the widespread limbs of an old oak.

“It’s been here about as long as Blessings has,” Melissa said. “They have a fairly new librarian. Her name is Gina Green. So let’s get this party started. Here’s hoping we find a lead for you today.”

“Here’s hoping,” Sully said.

They got out, and a couple of minutes later, Melissa was introducing him.

“Gina, this is Sully Raines, an old friend of mine who’s on a search to find his birth mother. Sully, this is Gina Green.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sully. How can I help you?” Gina said.

“The pleasure is mine,” Sully said. “I need to see some older issues of the local paper, going back at least thirty years to start.”

“They’re going to be on microfiche,” Gina said. “Follow me back here to the readers. I’ll show you how to access and load them. Try not to get them out of order.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sully said.

Gina set Sully and Melissa up with the first rolls of microfiche, showed them how to switch them out, and then left them to it.

“Here goes nothing,” Sully said as they began with issues over thirty-seven years back, which was when Robert and Janie Carter parted company.

They kept changing rolls of microfiche and reading, until they’d gone forward through five years of papers. At that point, Melissa quietly got up to go to the bathroom, and Sully was so focused on reading that he didn’t realize she was gone until a few minutes later. He looked toward the bathroom, then shrugged and kept reading until he saw how much time had passed since she left.

He got up to go check on her, but saw her curled up on a sofa in the reading area, sound asleep. He walked over to where she was lying to feel her pulse. It was as steady as her breathing.

He stood for a few moments looking down at her, remembering how mesmerizing her green eyes were when she watched him, and thought of the awkwardness of their first kiss. They had gotten better at it as the year progressed, but she’d moved away before it went any farther. He couldn’t help but think what might have been, and even let himself wonder what the possibilities were of having a relationship now.

Before his imagination took him any farther down the road to “what if,” a tear rolled from the corner of her eye and down the side of her nose.