My name is Sarah Miller. I’m a 40-year-old woman — well, I was 40 when this story really began — who spent most of her life pursuing a form of love that never seemed to stick. Some men have betrayed me and others have treated me as if I’m a temporary stop along the road to somewhere else. And through it all, I’ve seen my youth slip away. What I was left with was just a series of bruised hopes.
When a relationship ended, my mother would look at me with her overly familiar expression of worry and patience. “Sarah,” she would say, “maybe it’s time to stop pursuing perfection. James next door is a good man. He may limp, but he has a good heart.”
James Parker was the man living across the street. He was five years older than me and disabled in his right leg from a car accident at age 17. He and his elderly mother lived in a small wooden house on the outskirts of Burlington, Vermont. James worked as an electronics and computer repairman who could bring back any electric equipment from the dead.
For years, the neighbors talked that he had a thing for me. And that could be true, who knew, but James never said a single thing to me, expect his greeting when he would see me in the morning.
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