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      He blew air between full lips as he drove away to locate a parking spot. “Lord, this is not going to be an easy assignment.”

      * * *

      “Keep running,” Dr. Sanjay Khan said to Aaron, his lilting voice kind. “Just don’t overdo it. At your age a couple of miles a day is enough. I’m not even going to prescribe any medication because your arrhythmia doesn’t call for it. I do want you on the aspirin regimen and you need to watch your cholesterol more closely.”

      Aaron, lying in bed, one arm behind his head as he sat propped up on pillows, laughed softly. “Doc, you’re not going to take my butter away, are you? What am I going to dip my lobster in?”

      Dr. Khan laughed, too. “Butter and lobster, no wonder your cholesterol’s high. I want you on olive oil and good omega-3 seafood like salmon.”

      “I hate the taste of both,” Aaron complained.

      “You’ll just have to get used to them,” Lana spoke up as she entered the room.

      She walked straight over to her father, and kissed him on the cheek, then greeted Dr. Khan with a warm smile and a hearty hello.

      Dr. Khan, in his late forties, was about her height and looked fit in his white physician’s coat with a white shirt and black tie underneath, black slacks and sturdy black oxfords. His dark liquid eyes lit up at her hello. “You must be Lana,” he said. “Your father has been expecting you.”

      “Yes,” said Lana, smiling warmly. She lovingly gazed at Aaron. “How is he, Doctor?”

      Aaron started to say something, and Lana shushed him. He fell quiet, his face a mass of grins. He was so delighted to have her home, he didn’t care that she was being bossy, as usual.

      Dr. Khan patiently went over Aaron’s condition with Lana. She asked questions and he answered them to her satisfaction. When she felt there was no more to learn on the subject, she thanked Dr. Khan who told them he had to go but he would be back in the morning at which time he would let Aaron know if he could go home. The doctor advised that there were still test results that hadn’t come in yet.

      Alone with her father, Lana fell on him and hugged him tightly. Then she rose and peered into his beloved face, a face that was a pleasant reminder of their shared genetics. He also had a dash of freckles across the bridge of his nose. And if not for his sixty-two years his hair would have been the same red-brown. Today, it was pure white. His skin was a deep golden-brown due to the sun, wind and salt air that he lived in every day. She loved the crinkles around his brown eyes and the bushy white eyebrows above them.

      “I’ve missed you,” she said. Tears came to her eyes in spite of her attempt to keep them at bay.

      Aaron squeezed her hand. “I’m fine, sweetheart. You know nothing gets me down for long.”

      “I do,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “But the older I get the more I realize that you’re not getting any younger, either. That’s a scary thought. What would I do if anything ever happened to you? It’s not like I have a huge family to fall back on.”

      Her mother, Mariette, had a sister, Dorothy—Aunt Dottie to Lana—who lived in Florida. However her father was the last of the Braithwaites in North Carolina. There were some distant cousins in Massachusetts whom he never heard from. He and Mariette had wanted to have more children but they’d only been blessed with Lana.

      Lana wanted to have children with Jeremy but he had convinced her to wait a few more years. He said he wanted to enjoy their time as a couple for the first five years of their marriage. Then he said they could have a child or two. If given the choice of having Jeremy’s child with her now or him, Lana would have chosen the child. Just because Jeremy had proven unreliable and less than honest didn’t mean his child would have been tainted. The child would have been loved by her beyond measure.

      “You’re only thirty-two. There’s still time to have children and make me a granddaddy,” Aaron reminded her, his eyes twinkling with merriment.

      Lana laughed. “In case you haven’t heard, my husband’s a fugitive and I’m in the process of divorcing him.”

      “A wise decision, as I told you over the phone,” her father said. He patted the side of the bed and Lana sat down. He hugged her close. “Lana, there’s only one way to get on with your life when something as devastating as what happened to you occurs. You have to keep moving forward. You had plans before you met Jeremy. Some of them you put on hold for him. Becoming a mother was one of them. Jeremy’s not in the picture anymore. You have the reins. Don’t allow his behavior to define the rest of your life. We can’t control other people’s behavior. All we can do is control how we react to it.”

      “And even that’s hard to do,” Lana said.

      “Have you ever noticed how the important things in life are always difficult to accomplish? That’s because God wants you to recognize the blessings in life when you’re presented with them, and appreciate them.”

      Lana looked at her father with a deadpan expression. “Are you saying my experience has been a blessing?”

      “Now you know what kind of man you married. It would have been worse if you had been with him twenty years instead of five and all of this happened,” Aaron said reasonably.

      “It stings pretty badly right now,” Lana asserted.

      “Of course it does, but eventually they will find him, and you’ll be able to face him and tell him to go to hell and you’ll live through it. You’re tougher than you think.”

      Lana knew her father was right. After she had admitted to herself that Jeremy had faked his death and run away, she had spent weeks beating up on herself for being so gullible and allowing herself to love a man like him. Now, if she ever saw him again she believed she would stomp on him. She was that angry with him.

      She smiled at her dad. “What about your health and you being in the hospital for the first time in your life. Is that a blessing?”

      Aaron’s smile grew wider. “It got you home, didn’t it?”

      Lana rolled her eyes. “You never quit.”

      “Never, baby girl.”

      Lana stood up. She looked around the room. Flowers were on every available surface. “Your women?” she joked, referring to the number of bouquets.

      “Well, you know...” he said with no modesty whatsoever. “What can I say? There are more women than men in our age group. Somebody has to take up the slack.”

      Lana went to read a few of the cards attached to the bouquets. Sure enough, they were from females. Some names she recognized, some she didn’t. One in particular was of interest to her. It was her high school English teacher, Miss Ellen Newman.

      “Miss Newman, Daddy? You’re seeing Miss Newman?” She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

      “She’s an attractive woman,” Aaron said. “And we share certain interests.” He raised his eyebrows in a lascivious manner, which made Lana guffaw.

      “I don’t want to hear anything about Miss Newman’s certain interests,” Lana hurriedly told him.

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