Follow A Wild Heart (romance,) by Bobby Hutchinson

playing basketball. I pleaded with her not to send me, but she figured she was doing the best thing for me, I guess."
    Karena stared unseeingly at the green foliage passing by outside the car window, her head turned away from Logan as she remembered those miserable, bitterly unhappy years spent in her aunt's crowded house near an industrial area of the city. She'd been a painfully shy, socially retarded misfit.
    "Aunt Ellen was a widow who worked for Pillsbury Mills on a machine that bagged cake mixes all day long. Looking back, I realize now that she must have needed the money Pop paid for boarding me, because she didn't really have room for another kid in that house. She had three daughters of her own, two older and one younger than me. My parents thought it would be good for me to be more like my cousins, to go to a regular high school with kids my own age. They thought they were doing their best for me, but the whole thing was a disastrous mistake."
    "Why do you think so?" Logan asked.
    "Some kids don't adapt easily, and I was one of them. Those were awful years," she said quietly. "I was homesick all the time for the woods. My cousins could have come from a different planet for all we had in common, and they didn't particularly like the fact that they had to share their mother's attention or their bedroom with me. I hated high school. If Minneapolis hadn't had so many parks, I don't know how I'd have survived. Half the time I skipped out of school and rode my bike to Worth Park for the day. Needless to say, I didn't do very well at my studies. I didn't graduate."
    It was difficult to reveal herself to him, to confess that she was a high school dropout. But it was better that he knew her background, hard as it was to relate even now.
    "You must have felt so alone," he said softly.
    Karena shrugged and turned to give him a faint smile, glossing over details she didn't care to remember. "As soon as I could, I moved back to the type of life I was used to. I married, had Danny and when my husband was killed, I trained to be a log scaler so I'd have a job that would allow me to live the sort of life I wanted. Needed," she corrected, and the passionate conviction in her tone told Logan much more than the words did.
    Pity for her twisted his gut into a knot. She'd had a rough time, and it made him feel protective of her, especially when he compared it to his own carefree, happy childhood, growing up with his brothers and sisters, living in the same place until he chose to leave for college.
    "How long since your husband died, Karena? Was he a woodsman?" Logan knew he was prying, but he felt he had to know as much as she would tell him. He had to understand her, and there was so little time.
    "Eric died when Danny was just a baby, ten months old. We'd only been married two years. He was a faller, and there was a snag—you know, where one tree leans on the other in heavy parts of the woods—and when he cut one down, the other fell on him. It seems like a long time ago now." Another lifetime. Sometimes she barely remembered the blond boy with the brush cut in the faded photo on Danny's dresser, and when she tried to remember details about him, all that came back was the bad stuff, his drinking, the fights, the feeling of having trapped herself in an impossible situation.
    Then there was the awful tearing guilt when she finally admitted to herself that his death had set her free.
    At twenty, Eric had been far too young to marry, too young to be a husband, much less a father.
    "I think we'd probably have been divorced if he'd lived," she blurted candidly to Logan, and felt amazed at herself for having said it out loud. She'd never admitted that to a living soul before now.
    Logan seemed to understand.
    "I was engaged once myself," Logan said. "Lucky thing we didn't marry, looking back on it. It was six years ago, and we'd been engaged for over a year before she decided she wanted to be a doctor. Then she also decided she didn't want