Finding Eden (A Sign of Love Novel)(110)

"I'm already attached," Eden said. "I just think maybe I shouldn't get any more attached."
"I understand," I said, kissing her hand again.
She smiled softly. "I know you do."
When we pulled in to the town of New Albany, we plugged the address of the university into the GPS on my phone and then headed in that direction. We cruised slowly through the residential neighborhoods close to the college. We didn't have what had been Thomas Greer's address and so we didn't exactly have a location, so we just drove aimlessly. After about an hour, Eden huffed out a breath and said, "Nothing even looks vaguely familiar about this town. And all these houses are starting to look the same to me. I mean," she lifted her arms and let them drop, "even if he did bring me here, to this place, even if we drove right past the house I lived in, the yard might be completely different now. It's been fourteen years." She took a deep breath. "Oh well, at least we tried. I'm sure the police will be able to get his address and they can show me a picture. Maybe I'll recognize it. Maybe it doesn't even matter." She smiled over at me, but it seemed forced.
"Why don't we stop by the university?" I suggested. "It's lunch time. We could get some college cafeteria food and pretend like we're just two kids from suburbia who spotted each other across the bleachers at a football game and fell in love at first sight." I grinned over at her and she laughed, leaning over and kissing my cheek.
"Okay. I like that plan."
As I thought about it, I realized that it would have been true. No matter where Eden and I had been placed together in this world, we would have fallen in love. Whether we'd been two college freshman, two farm hands, two gypsies—two anything—the falling in love part of our story would have been the same. She would have pulled my heart from across a gymnasium, or a cornfield, or a traveling caravan.
We parked in the visitors lot and held hands as we strolled through the campus. It was a strange feeling. On one hand, I loved just being with Eden, and blending in among the other people close to our age, all walking around. It made it feel like we really were just two average college students, and that we fit in here just like anyone else. For that moment, we didn't have a past that was much different than any other average American kid's. For that moment, we hadn't lived through heartbreak and struggle and trauma. But on the other hand, this was the place where Hector had worked . . . where he had taught students and perhaps where the idea of Acadia was hatched. A small chill went down my spine when I thought about the fact that right here, this was the place where the idea that would change my and Eden's life forever was born.
And yet.
This was also the place where the idea that would bring Eden and I together came to be. It was hard to know how to feel about that. Sometimes it seemed so much of the beauty in life resulted from the ugly. And how did you make sense of such things? How could you be thankful for something when so much suffering was necessary to bring it to you? Or was that the very thing that defined real beauty–light after darkness? And maybe that was the whole point. If you constantly sought beauty in the most obvious places, in only the brightest of circumstances, perhaps you weren't really looking for it at all.
We stopped and asked someone for directions to the cafeteria and then made our way there. After waiting in line to purchase sandwiches, we sat at one of the tables and chatted and ate. I couldn't help but notice all the guys who kept stealing glances at Eden. I could hardly blame them. She was the prettiest girl in the cafeteria. She was the prettiest girl in Indiana, hell, the world as far as I was concerned. And she had my baby in her belly. A fierce feeling of pride swept through me and I sat up a little straighter, grinning across at her. Eden raised one delicate eyebrow.