Chapter 14

Their laughter as they came in the door of her aunt’s house met with more quizzical looks. She offered to help him unload their things from the truck but he told her he had it, and she sat down at the table with her mom and aunt instead. They looked at her, as if waiting for her to share something about her morning with them.

“We didn’t catch anything – not even a butterfly,” she told them. It wasn’t exactly the kind of dirt they wanted to hear about her outing with Cody, but they also knew it was unlikely that they would get anything more out of her.

“Well, I made some sandwiches for lunch,” Aunt Mary said, getting up and heading off to the kitchen. On her way back, Cody came in with the cooler and emptied the ice out in the sink, rinsing it off and taking it back out with him. He snatched a sandwich from the tray in her hand as she walked back toward the table with it.

“Thanks, Mary. You’re my best girl,” he said, kissing her on the cheek and darting out the front door.

“He sure seems happy this morning,” Susan’s mother said, looking intently at her daughter.

“Sure does,” Mary repeated with a smile.

“Oh, you two! Stop it. Nothing happened between us. We fished and talked. That was it,” Susan told them. “You know that it’s too soon for me to even think about seeing anyone else.”

“What does that mean?” Aunt Mary asked.

“Oh, we haven’t told you about all of that yet,” Susan’s mother said. “Do you mind if I tell her, Susan?” Susan shook her head. She didn’t feel up to telling her Aunt Mary about Paul Brennan, but didn’t mind if her mother did. Staring at her hands, she listened while her mother shared how Paul had tracked her down somehow and wooed her into a relationship solely because she had his fiancées eyes, or at least, part of them.

“That is so weird. I mean, it’s not like he could see them. The cornea is clear, isn’t it? I mean, the surgery didn’t change your eye color. Were her eyes blue, as well?” Aunt Mary asked, looking toward Susan.

“No, they were brown. Almost the color of my contacts,” Susan said, almost to herself.

It was the first time that it struck Susan that Paul had never seen her natural eye color. Even when they slept over at one another’s place and when they had been in Paris, she always had either her contacts in or her glasses on. Unless he knew anything about the process, he had assumed her eyes were the almost golden-brown color of her contacts. From the pictures she had seen of Miranda, it was very close in color. So close that someone might chalk up any differences to the surgery somehow altering the original shade ever so slightly. He literally thought he was looking into Miranda’s eyes.

“Oh, my God!” Aunt Mary exclaimed even as Susan continued to mull over the fact that she had inadvertently only lent to Paul’s delusions about her similarity to his dead fiancée. “I saw him. He was at the hospital when you had your surgery!” Susan yanked her head up to stare at her Aunt Mary.

“What?” Susan asked.

“When you were in surgery, we were able to watch the procedure through the blinds outside. There was a man there watching along with us. I assumed that he was an intern or a student, though, he was a little older than I would expect. These days, people do go to school later in life sometimes, though. Anyway, he was watching your surgery,” she told them, describing the man she had seen. It was most certainly Paul.

“He was there during the implant?” Susan asked.

“Yes, and afterward. I saw him in the days that followed in the hallway,” she said.

“And you never said anything about this strange man watching her?” Susan’s mother offered.

“Well, no. Like I said, I thought he was supposed to be there. It never occurred to me that some strange man was just lurking about like that,” Aunt Mary finished.

Susan felt numb. Paul had not tracked her down. He knew where to find her all along. Susan was certain that he was the blurry figure she saw right after they took her bandages off, and now another memory was coming back to her. The sad man sitting near her room when she had left the hospital. The nurse had said he recently lost his fiancée and she didn’t know why he was there. It was Paul. He was there to watch her, and he had continued to watch her in the months that followed. How many times had she seen him here and there that she discounted? If he had not been forced to push her out of the way of the bike that day, would he still just be following her around?

“You mean he has been stalking her all this time?” her mother said, looking uneasily at Susan.

“It sounds like it,” Aunt Mary replied. Both women looked at Susan with bewildered expressions, but Susan’s heart and mind raced a thousand miles a minute. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling in that moment. Though she was angry about the way Paul had come into her life, she knew she loved him. Perhaps she hadn’t said those words to him, but it was true, and there was something about the way he talked to her, held her that seemed like so much more than just the need to keep someone who he used to love close to him in the only way he knew how.

“Maybe it started out that he just felt drawn to me because a part of Miranda now belonged to me and he was curious about me, but how far can you take an adoration for a pair of corneas if you no longer feel the connection with their previous owner? Perhaps, Paul was drawn to me because this small part of me was all he had left of his fiancée, but I can’t believe that alone is enough to have made him pursue more,” Susan told them.

“Susan, I don’t want you to get hurt by this man,” her mother said.

“Mom, I’ve already been hurt. The question is, am I willing to push aside that pain in order to find out why he has done this? If the answer is simply that he got caught up in the notion that I had her eyes and he saw her when he looked into these contacts I wear, then perhaps there is nothing for us. What if that isn’t the answer, though? What if the answer is that he saw something more? Maybe he let go of her and wanted to be with me?” Susan told her.

“How could you ever know if you are always a reminder to him?” her mother asked.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about Dan. He was my best friend, and I will love him until the day I take my last breath, but I’ve learned to let him go and move on. I didn’t think I ever could, but then I met Paul, and I began to see that I could have a future with someone else. People die and their loved ones eventually move on,” Susan replied.

“Yes, but you had five years to grieve Dan. You let him go little by little. When did this man have the time to grieve? He launched himself into stalking and pursuing you. That’s not healthy. In a way, it’s almost sick,” Aunt Mary added.

“Perhaps we just all grieve in different ways and we just can’t understand the way another person processed their pain,” Susan offered. She wasn’t sure if she even believed what she was saying, but she was willing to give Paul the benefit of the doubt. He would have to make the first move. If he didn’t, then she felt he was giving her the answers she needed, but if he came to her, she would listen. She would hear him out and consider his side of things. She had to. She loved him, and that much was not in doubt.

“Obviously, I can’t tell you what to do. I am just cautioning you to tread lightly,” her mother told her with a concerned look.

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll be careful.” Susan smiled, biting into one of the sandwiches as she continued to ponder the situation with Paul.