Where My Heart Breaks by Ivy Sinclair Page B

ailing wife and realizes that his marriage isn’t quite the sham that he told her it was.”
    Reed nodded his head in approval, and I felt a warm flush of pleasure. “That’s right. Except in real life, that’s the old Bleckerville Town Hall. We’ve never had a Presbyterian Church in town.” He circled another location on the map. This one looked to be about a mile or two outside of Bleckerville.
    “I would have thought a town hall would be in town,” I said, staring at the map.
    “Bleckerville Township was established in 1812, and the original town was burned to the ground during the Civil War. All of the buildings except the town hall, which was eventually restored before falling into ruin again in the early 1900s. The families who stayed in the area decided to move the town a bit further inland to avoid the river flooding that was common back then.”
    I had to admit that I was impressed. “Why did Moolen use the town hall instead of an actual church in town then?”
    Reed smiled a wry smile. “That’s an excellent question, Ms. Spivey.” He dug through his stack of files and pulled one out before flipping it open. I saw a couple of old newspaper clippings inside on top of a sheaf of papers. Reed handed them to me.
    “Camilla Landry Donates Town Hall Structure To The City of Bleckerville.” I read the headline out loud. The subtitle mentioned that Mrs. Landry’s generous donation came on the heels of her husband’s passing. The other newspaper clipping announced funeral services for one Jackson Landry. I blinked and looked at Reed. “Jackson and Camilla were real people?”
    “I believe that Moolen plucked their names from the obituary and donation announcement during his visit to the library here in town when he stayed at the Willoughby that summer. It may have even precipitated the idea for the novel. Now, the real Jackson and Camilla don’t bear any real resemblance to the couple he wrote about in the story, but there’s the connection.”
    I watched Reed’s lips move as he explained the facts to me, and felt like swooning. He appeared to be the epitome of the perfect man. He had the body and the brains. It was an explosive combination, and one that I would have a hard time resisting if he ever did decide to turn his charms on me.
    For the next two hours, I let Reed guide me through the main locations around the Willoughby property and show me his research from his thesis. I was entranced, not only with the story but with the man explaining its intricacy to me. I was sucked into all of it, and now I couldn’t wait to read the rest of the book.
    When the “Open” signed blinked off in the window behind Reed’s head, it was as if I emerged from a trance. I instantly felt regret that our time together was over. We had done nothing but talk, but I felt as if the more I understood about Walter Moolen’s novel, the more I understood Reed. He had to have chosen his subject matter for his thesis for a reason, and I wondered what that reason was.
    He was intense and passionate on the topic, but patient with my endless stream of questions. We bantered several times over a plot point that made absolutely no sense to me, but he assured me that if I had lived during the early twentieth century in Bleckerville, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.  
    As we poured over the map and Reed’s notes, several times our arms touched and we were within inches of each other. I smelled his musky cologne and wondered what it would be like to sink into his arms. Then he would move away, and I had to remind myself for the millionth time that we were not there as a couple. It was like a book club, except I had the misfortune of being in a book club with one of the hottest guys on the planet. It was as if fate wanted to clock me over the head with how unfair life could be to me just to prove a point.
    As we started to put our papers away, I watched the other people file through the picket fence and out into the street. Even