title: Message in a Bottle
author:  Nicholas Sparks 
description: If you thought <a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0446520802/${0}"><i>The Notebook</i></a> was a tearjerker, get out the hankies, pull up a chair, and get ready to have your heart monkey-wrenched by Nicholas Sparks's second star-crossed love story, <i>Message in a Bottle</i>. When Theresa Osborne takes a much-needed summer holiday at Cape Cod, she finds a lot more than a break from the hustle and bustle. On an early-morning jog along Cape Cod Bay, she comes across a corked bottle with a scrolled-up message inside that reads, "My Dearest Catherine, I miss you, my darling, as I always do, but today is especially hard because the ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together..." It bobbles around in the same vein for several more paragraphs and ends with "...am alone on the pier and I do not care what others think as I bow my head and cry and cry and cry. Garret."
zlib_text: 
  
  
  # Message In A Bottle
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Message In A Bottle
  
  
  Nicholas Sparks
  
  
  PROLOGUE
  
  
  The bottle was dropped overboard on a warm summer evening, a few hours before
  the rain began to fall. Like all bottles, it was fragile and would break if
  dropped a few feet from the ground. But when sealed properly and sent to sea,
  as this one was, it became one of the most seaworthy objects known to man. It
  could float safely through hurricanes or tropical storms, it could bob atop
  the most dangerous of riptides. It was, in a way, the ideal home for the
  message it carried inside, a message that had been sent to fulfill a promise.
  
  
  Like that of all bottles left to the whim of the oceans, its course was
  unpredictable. Winds and currents play large roles in any bottle’s direction;
  storms and debris may shift its course as well. Occasionally a fishing net
  will snag a bottle and carry it a dozen miles in the opposite direction in
  which it was headed. The result is that two bottles dropped simultaneously
  in