Sixteen-year-old Jessica Wilson meets Mark Fripp while they are both living at Fort Benning. They are both Army children. They fall in love as much as teens are able to fall in love, but after only six weeks, Mark has to leave when his father is transferred to Italy. Jessica and Mark email each other for a time, but then the emails from Mark stop coming and Jessica believes he no longer loves her. He actually does try to email her, but she’s not getting them, and can’t answer him. Her heart is broken.
Both their fathers die in the Battle of Kirkuk in 2003 in Iraq while serving in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, but neither knows the other’s father had died. Both are separately dealing with the grief of missing each other and losing their fathers in the same year. Both had been using military emails to communicate and the accounts were taken away when their fathers died. That is part of what happened to their communication.
We learn this story as Jessica tells it to her troubled sixteen-year-old daughter Chelsea after she has run away from home during a period of depression after a break-up with her boyfriend. She was found and returned, but Jessica was afraid she might leave again. She seemed to have turned into a different girl, one who had dropped out of her extracurricular activities and taken up bad habits. Once Chelsea was back home, Jessica had tried everything she knew to help her, including therapy, church, and horseback riding lessons, but none of it seemed to help. Jessica is afraid of losing Chelsea every time she leaves home alone. It appears Chelsea believes Jessica cannot understand the pain she feels after the break-up.
Jessica decides to force Chelsea to take a three-hour drive back to Fort Benning where she, Jesssica, had fallen in love. It is isolated enough there so that she may get the chance to tell Chelsea her own story of heartbreak without having her jump out of the car and run away.
When the story opens, it is 2013. Jessica is living with her widowed sister Jill whose husband has died in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, leaving her with three children at home. They live a block from Jessica’s mother Clara and her second husband Paul. Jessica helps Jill with the children and their activities and works seasonally at an animal rescue center. Jessica is engaged to a wealthy rancher, Blake McCormick, even though what she feels for him is a much different kind of love than that she had felt for Mark.
Mark had also had a miserable ten years of grief. He was living in Arizona in Navajo Nation after being discharged from the Air Forces’s 55th Rescue Squadron two years earlier. He had been disqualified for further service after an accident in Afghnistan that left him colorblind after his other injuries had healed. He missed the Air Force, and felt like damaged goods because of the discharge. For two years he had been chasing opportunities for new thrills in risky activities.
Now he wanted to go to Capetown, South Africa to to jump from the Blouskrans Bridge, the highest one on earth at 708 feet. But first he had one more thing to do. He had found out where Jessica was living and he wanted to go and see her. He had never gotten over losing her and hoped they could yet pick up the pieces of their relationship. He hopped on his Honda VFR Interceptor with a ticket to Capetown in his pocket, and headed for Atlanta to find Jessica. As Jessica told Chelsea at the beginning of her story, ‘I was engaged…and then my past came walking in the back door.’
To see what happened you need to read Come Find Me