The young man striding confidently down the street ahead looked vaguely familiar. Rhett looked sharply at him, trying to remember where he knew him from. He looked almost like... but no, it couldn't be. Wade Hamilton hadn't been seen around here for years; when Scarlett had gone away after their divorce, she had taken her children with her, and no one knew where they had gone. Perhaps it was a relative of Wade's'? The resemblance was very striking.

Rhett walked faster, crossing a busy street to get a closer look. The young man turned unexpectedly, and caught Rhett looking at him. At first, a frown crossed his face; then, just as Rhett was about to make an apologetic motion and turn away, the other man smiled. "Captain Butler!" he called, looking pleased.

It was Wade. Feeling oddly as though he were dreaming, Rhett moved forward and grasped the hand the younger man held out to him.

"Wade?" he asked, surprised to hear that his voice sounded quite normal. "It - uh – it's been years! How have you been?"

"I'm well, Captain Butler," Wade told him. "I've been at university in England, but I've come back to attend VMI for my last year. It's been a life-long ambition of mine; my father would have wanted it, I think."

Rhett remembered vaguely that Charlie Hamilton had come from a long line of military officers. Having his son attend his alma mater was the kind of thing that would have mattered to him. "Yes, I suppose," he said, clapping the other man's shoulder. "Do you have time for a drink? I'd like to hear what you've been doing with yourself." And where your mother has been all these years, he thought bitterly.

Wade pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it. Then he looked at Rhett apologetically. "Actually, Captain Butler, I have a dinner engagement in a few minutes. I have to leave town town tomorrow, so tonight will be my last chance to meet my friends. However, we could have breakfast in the morning, if you like. Before I catch the train back to Atlanta."

"That would be fine," Rhett said. They made arrangements to meet in the dining room of the hotel Wade was staying at – a nice, upper class hotel, although not the recently built luxury hotel that Rhett preferred.

The next morning, Rhett sipped a cup of coffee and waited with what patience he could muster for his ex-wife's son to join him. He had been early; unable to sleep for thinking that today was the day he would finally discover what had happened to Scarlett.

She had surprised him, six months after Miss Melly died, by signing the divorce papers he had sent her. He had expected to have to go back to Atlanta and use a combination of bribery and coercion to persuade her, and his first settlement offer was deliberately low, leaving him room to negotiate. But the papers came back within a week, all properly signed and notarized, with a note containing only two words. "Be happy," she had written; for the first time since he had known her, an action Scarlett took had stunned him beyond belief.

So, of course, he had not believed. He had assumed that she had a trick up her sleeve, some sly plan to get him back. After all, she told him that she loved him, and Scarlett was never a woman to give up what she loved. He half-expected that one day he would look up and there she would be, disturbing his peace in Charleston just as she had disturbed his peace everywhere else he had gone in the fifteen years since he had first met her.

But she did not come.

Nor were there any letters or emissaries on her behalf. She made no effort to contact him at all. Several business matters that might have provided an excuse for a meeting were handled efficiently, by their lawyers, without one.

A year after the divorce, he had allowed his mother to persuade him that he should search for a new wife, a proper, submissive wife who would love him the way Scarlett never had. That would bring her, he was fiercely certain; when rumors reached Atlanta that he was searching for a new wife, Scarlett's competitive instincts would rise to the fore, bringing her here to fight for him. He felt confidently sure of it, so sure that he pictured how he would turn her away, scorning her as she had once scorned him.

But she did not come.

Six months after he had begun his 'search' for a wife, he began to feel the stirrings of real alarm. The behavior he was seeing was so unlike the Scarlett he had known for so long. He could think of nothing except dire illness or catastrophe that could keep Scarlett away from what she had decided she wanted, and the last time he had spoken to her, she had wanted him. The fact that she made no effort to see him or communicate with him in all this time had gone beyond surprising, and would have worried him if he cared at all for her anymore.

Of course, he did not care. It was only his dutiful concern for Ella and Wade that made him go to Atlanta, determined to find out what had caused Scarlett's strange silence. The fact that the concern was a little belated never occurred to him, even though it was almost two years to the day after Melly's death that he tired of waiting, and caught a train to Atlanta to find out what happened to Scarlett. From the station, he walked to the house on Peachtree Street, certain that within moments, his questions would be answered.

But she was not there.

Oh, the house was lived in. Relatives of the governor had bought the place, lock, stock and barrel, eighteen months ago, but they had never met Scarlett, and had no idea where she was. Likewise, Uncle Henry Hamilton had no idea where she could be found. He held authority to deal with any business emergencies, he told Rhett, gruffly; anything else, he sent to a postal address in Richmond, and waited for Scarlett's replies. Not that there was much other business. Scarlett had sold the store to Hugh Elsing, for a ridiculously low price, not even a week after Henry had sent the signed divorce papers back to Rhett, so there were only a few investments, and a pension for Aunt Pitty.

Back at his hotel, Rhett paced for a while, trying to think of where Scarlett might have gone. When the idea finally hit, it was so obvious that he wondered if he perhaps suffered from premature dementia for not thinking of it before. Tara! Of course, Scarlett would go to Tara. She had always loved the place excessively; even in the early days of their marriage, she had spent far more time than he liked at what he called 'that white elephant in Clayton County.' Rhett caught the afternoon train south, sure that this time, he had tracked down his quarry.

But she was not there.

Suellen told him, with what appeared as genuine surprise, that Scarlett had never come here again after Melly died. She had arranged for a trust with a certain amount of money in it to be available to meet her share of the operating expenses of Tara, with instructions to apply to Uncle Henry if more was needed. Not only had she not come here, but she apparently took no further interest in managing Tara; all Will's decisions in the last two years had been approved without comment or question.

"And that," Suellen had said, wiping her hands on her apron as she spoke to Rhett at the kitchen door, "is most unlike Scarlett."

Rhett had to agree. He returned to Atlanta, and pursued an ever-fainter trail. He went to Richmond, where Henry Hamilton said that he sent her mail, only to discover that Scarlett used a mailing service to retrieve her correspondence and send it on to an address that Rhett discovered belonged to an attorney in Boston. He, quite properly, refused to pass on any information about Scarlett's whereabouts without her permission. Perhaps feeling sorry for Rhett, who by this time was visibly upset, he offered to pass on a letter to Scarlett, if Rhett cared to write one.

Rhett did.

Of all the things he had done in his life, he came to regret that letter the most. In it, he used anger to disguise his hurt dismay at the idea that Scarlett intended to cut him out of her life completely. He told her that even he had not expected her to be so low, so contemptible, as to take her children away from the people and places they loved and raise them among strangers. He had accused her of running out on her responsibilities, to Tara and in Atlanta, and he had ended by telling her that while he would be pleased never to hear from her again, he would like to correspond with the children.

A few weeks later, he received a completely proper, exquisitely polite letter from Scarlet, telling him that, given his hostility towards her, she thought it best that he have no contact with the children. She would not, she informed him, trouble him further.

And she had not.

That letter had come nine years ago, and he never saw or heard anything from Scarlett again. It was as if she had vanished from the face of the earth, and Rhett had been dismayed to discover that with her went most of his life's joy. She had been his lodestar, and without her, he seemed unable to find purpose, or balance.

So now he sat here, at this breakfast table, waiting to find out what had happened to Scarlett.

So, what do you think? Is it worth continuing? I have another chapter I just have to upload and edit; review if you'd like to see it. Or if you wouldn't... I'm a big girl, I can take criticism! But review!