When Light Breaks Read Online Free Page B

forever. As women can do, I’d spent hours discussing my failure with my best friend, Charlotte. “Why can’t I love enough? Well enough?”
    Through the years Charlotte had had many theories about why I hadn’t fallen for someone. In college she believed I missed my mama too much to let anyone in. Then she believed—on college graduation night, when I had had too much red wine—that I was waiting for someone to make me feel just like Jack Sullivan had made me feel. By the time we’d started our careers and moved back to our hometown, she surmised I just hadn’t found the right man.
    I’d worked at my job as a PGA TOUR manager for five years when I met Peyton. I didn’t usually have much contact with the pro golf players or their families—I worked behind the scenes making sure everything was organized for the golf tournaments. Although my job was insanely demanding, it offered me a sincere sense of accomplishment. I did everything from ordering the volunteer uniforms, to picking out the menus for the catered meals, to finding child care for the players’ kids. I arranged the trophy ceremony and the pro-am tournament the day before the major, along with handling a thousand other details associated with the tournaments.
    My many responsibilities—taking care of the house, my daddy, and my job—ensured that I was constantly busy. It wasn’t that Daddy was sick or disabled. As I’d grown up, I had just naturally and slowly taken over Mama’s role at home. Sometimes I felt that I missed her less when I was acting in her place. If I stepped directly into her shoes—did the grocery shopping, prepared the meals, washed the dishes and did the laundry—she was somehow still present, still in the house if those chores were done and done well.
    We did have a housekeeper who cleaned, the same one since I was born, but I took care of everything else, and wasn’t out looking for one more thing to fill my life.
    Then on the tenth green of the Palmetto Pointe Golf Club I met Peyton Ellers. I’d escorted a professional photographer onto the golf course during a practice round for a local golf tournament—called a scramble—to take pictures of Peyton. Of course I knew who Peyton Ellers was—everyone in Palmetto Pointe knew who he was. He’d moved to town ten years earlier as a young pro golfer. He’d played on the Georgia Tech Golf Team, then the Nationwide tour until he moved to the PGA TOUR. News of his arrival was in all the papers, stories of how this gorgeous pro golfer had bought his mother a house on the river and himself one on the golf course. To the shock of the golfing community, he’d moved to Palmetto Pointe, South Carolina, instead of to one of the higher-end Florida courses where most of the professionals lived.
    At thirty-five years old, he was moving toward the top of the earnings list for the PGA TOUR—and he was single. The press loved him, the PGA TOUR loved him, and the girls loved him.
    Peyton’s would be the ideal photo on the PGA TOUR’s brochure to showcase our new Pete Dye-designed golf course, and announce Palmetto Pointe becoming a new PGA TOUR tournament.
    The photographer, Jim, and I walked onto the green as we waited for Peyton to come over the hill. The wind whipped my hair into tangled circles. Jim set up his cameras and asked for my assistance as he filled each one with film and checked the lighting against the river in the background. “Are you using one hundred ASA or higher film speed?” I asked, pushing my hair out of my face.
    Jim paused in adjusting his camera. “Both. I wanted to get some of Peyton in action and some of him posing against the water’s edge.”
    “Will you use the digital or your Nikon F3 for the action?” I lifted the black camera. “And are you using color or the reverse Polaroid I’ve seen you use for some of your portraits.”
    He smiled at me and lifted his camera. “You want to do this shoot instead of me?”
    I laughed. “I wish I knew enough