Read The Beginning: An eShort Prequel to the Bridge for Free Online Page B

His grin brightened the room all the same. The family had already signed the necessary paperwork, so this was the last step. Both parents shook Molly’s hand as they left. “What you’re doing here, it’s making a difference.” The dad’s eyes were warm. “I have a feeling you could be doing many more things with your time.” He nodded at her. “Merry Christmas.”
    “Thank you.” Molly hesitated. “Happy holidays.”
    The family turned their attention to Buster and the excitement of getting him out the door in the pouring rain and into their van parked just outside. As the family drove off, Molly checked the time. Six minutes till closing. She walked to the door and flipped the sign. The cages were clean, and the animals were all exercised by ten volunteer high school kids who had worked until an hour ago. She would check the water bowls and head home.

    He called the video project “The Bridge.”
    Somewhere in the opening credits, he wrote this descriptor: How a small-town boy from Carthage, Mississippi, and a highbrow girl from Pacific Heights, California, found common ground on a daily commute down Franklin Road outside Music City to The Bridge—the best little bookstore in the world.
    Too wordy, too many locations, Molly had told him. The two of them would laugh about how he ever could’ve gotten an A on the assignment with such a horrific descriptor.
    Molly set her drenched things down just inside the door of her walk-up apartment, turned on the lights, and took off her dripping raincoat. She lived well below her means, in a new two-bedroom unit on the famous NW Twenty-third Street. Trees along Twenty-third sparkled with twinkling lights even in July, and the street boasted local coffee shops, cafés, and boutiques with only-in-Portland art and fashion. The pace and people took the edge off.
    Her father would have hated it.
    Dinner simmered in the Crock-Pot, vegetable potato soup with fresh-diced leeks and garlic and parsley. The soup he taught her to make. Her Black Friday soup. A whiny meow came from the laundry room, and her cat Sam strolled up, rubbing against her ankles. He was a funny cat. More dog than feline. “Hi, Sam.”
    He flopped down on the kitchen floor and put his head between his paws.
    “Exhausted, are you?” She bent down and scratched beneath his chin. “Good boy, Sam. Don’t overdo it.”
    She ladled out a small bowlful of soup, grabbed her blanket and the remote control and settled into one half of her leather love seat. The top button on the remote dimmed the lights, and the next would start the movie, which had been in the player since early that morning.
    Molly caught her hair in her hands and pulled it to one side.
    His name was Ryan Kelly.
    Now he was married to the sweet Southern belle he’d dated back in high school, no doubt teaching music at Carthage High in Nowhere, Mississippi. But for two years while they attended Belmont University, Ryan had been hers. She’d dreamed of never going home again and playing violin for the philharmonic, and he’d talked about touring with a country band, making music with his guitar for a living. In the end, he had Kristen, his Southern girl back home, and Molly had her dad’s empire to run in San Francisco.
    But for those four sweet semesters at the Franklin bookstore, nothing came between them.
    The ending was the hardest, the final touch, the turning away, her trembling hands. Every gut-wrenching heartbeat remained etched into her soul forever. Their good-bye had happened so fast, she still wasn’t sure she understood why. How they could’ve parted ways so quickly and finally.
    Molly hit the play button, and as the music began, the familiar ache built inside her. She didn’t often allow herself this trip back to then. But the day after Thanksgiving belonged to him, to the way things once were, and to the unavoidable, inescapable truth.
    Like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, she should’ve said something.

    He had set the