Welcome to Rainbow Man, a serialized novel about a grieving widower who travels to Spain to find solace and restart a life only to find himself entangled in the counterculture past of a younger woman.
Summary of Chapter 13: Chloe and Robert make their way through the mountains to the ancient cave drawings, Indalo Man, and Chloe breaks down with emotion.
For the first time since his visit, Robert had noticed how many in Spain searched for and found shade. He wondered why he hadn’t noted this before. It took a walk through the Parque de Maria Luisa in Seville for him to realize how Spaniards sought the sunless side of the walkway and street so they might last in the heat. The hat he had purchased when he first arrived was still with him, and it was a walk along the fence around the lotus pond where he fully understood the goodness of that hat in the relentlessness of the Spanish sun. A young couple held hands and maneuvered back and forth out of the bright light to the cooler shadows of the trees. They were a beautiful pair, this couple. And that was something else he had noticed more so in Seville than in Granada or anywhere else—how beautiful the people were; how it was hard to take your eyes off of them. Earlier that day, there had been a wedding party at the vast Plaza de España, a photographer following close by. The bride in white lace, the gown’s train held in her hand above the ground, her olive skin lustrous, her dark hair in ringlets along her cheeks. The groom—dark, slender, tall—a red rose attached to his black lapel, smiled in the glory of her. Maybe it was Seville, the grand plaza and the park, the light and the shade that had refocused how Robert was now viewing this country and its people. He had come to Seville to be alone, to think, and although that is what he had been doing, he also had permitted himself to discover something more here, something revealing. Much had changed now, the magnificence of a life more apparent. Robert had sought the shadows, but he also had stood in the sun.
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