First Chapter: The Dance We Shared by David Tindell

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Ben Fletcher seems to have it all going for him. In his early fifties, he’s in great shape thanks to a disciplined regimen of weight training, swimming and martial arts. He has a job that pays him a good living in the charming Wisconsin city of La Crosse. Divorced a quarter-century earlier, he remains close to his two grown children and grandkids. Ben is content with his life.

But he’s not happy. Twenty years ago, he was, during that glorious year and a half he was dating the glamorous Veronica Starr. They were an “item”: Ben, the city’s highest-rated radio announcer, and Ronnie, an award-winning TV newscaster. They were starting to talk about the future, one that would include marriage and kids. But then, Ben made a stupid mistake, and it all came crashing down. Ronnie broke off the relationship, met an older man and married him. Within a year she was gone, moving with her new husband to the Twin Cities. Ben had no choice but to move on with his life the best he could.

One day, he’s cleaning out a file cabinet in his office and finds an old catalog. Before throwing it out, he riffles through its pages, and an envelope drops onto his desk. Opening it, he finds a card. In handwriting he immediately recognizes as Ronnie’s are a phone number and the words, “Please help me.” When he looks again at the envelope he sees the postmark: it had been sent five years earlier…just before Veronica Starr left her husband, quit her job and disappeared.

David’s latest book is The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3).

╰┈➤Book Details

● Title: The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3)

● Author: David Tindell

● Genre: Romantic Suspense

● Language:English

● Pages: 229

● Publisher: KDP

● Publication Date: August 9, 2026

● Price: Kindle $2.99

First Chapter:

Monday morning.

Please help me.

Three words. The first from her in…how long? They were definitely hers, though. Not in an email but real ink on paper, and not typed, but written, in her distinct, precise and very feminine cursive, with a phone number below. On the inside of a card, otherwise blank. On the face of the card, the Minneapolis skyline.

The square envelope, empty now, lay there on my desk, its face staring up at me. My office address, also in her hand. No return address, though. And the kicker: the postmark. The card had been sent from the Twin Cities almost exactly five years ago.

It was the start of a new week, and my first order of business for the morning was to clean out a filing cabinet that was due to be taken away, destined for a homeless shelter. The athletic director had emailed the staff, asking us to consider donating little-used office furniture to the cause. Today was the deadline to have stuff ready for a crew of students to haul away. The cabinet was an easy choice. As the media relations director for athletics at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, I had a lot of records, and since most of them now were electronic, I really had no use for this old gray clunker. What paper there was inside, I thought, could be sorted through, most of it discarded, the important stuff filed in the one remaining cabinet.

I’d pulled a catalog out of the bottom drawer, from some long-forgotten and probably shuttered sporting goods supplier and was just about to toss it into the trash bin when something—that’s all I can call it, something—prompted me to riffle through the pages. You never knew. And the envelope dropped out and onto my desk.

Getting something from the Twin Cities wasn’t out of the ordinary. Here in La Crosse, everybody was familiar with the Minnesota metropolis ninety minutes away. People listened to its radio stations and watched its TV channels, and went there for the shopping, college and pro sports, the theaters, and of course the airport. I went there only when work demanded it, and if I flew anywhere, it was usually out of the smaller airport in La Crosse, where I’d lived for the past quarter-century. I avoided the Cities because she worked there. Or used to, until she left. And it wasn’t as if she’d resigned from her high-visibility job as morning news anchor on the market’s highest-rated TV station and went somewhere else, maybe the network’s morning show in New York, which is where I always assumed she’d wind up.

No. It was five years ago, right after the date on the postmark, that Veronica Starr, the love of my life, vanished.

It had been in all the papers, of course. Both of the Twin Cities dailies gave it coverage, and the story was even picked up by national outlets. “TV Personality Disappears” was what the headlines generally said. I’d clipped a few of them, although I wasn’t sure why. Even before that, it was painful enough to know that every morning, I could turn on my TV before going to work and Ronnie would be there, still an auburn-haired beauty into her mid-forties, always perfectly coiffed, stylishly dressed, unbearably cheery for that early in the morning.

I didn’t mind that last part, because I could relate to it. After all, I’d been an early-morning person for a long time, too: the morning announcer on La Crosse’s top-ranked radio station for thirteen years by then, up every morning at four-thirty, in the studio by half past five. It could be a grind, especially during basketball season, when I was calling three or four games a week, but the pay was decent and the job was responsible for bringing me and Ronnie together. When she was on TV every morning, she was Veronica, waking up her viewers with the latest news, saying hello to the weather gal, bringing in the sports guy for last night’s scores. My radio listeners were no different. Probably a lot of them were the same people. They wanted to hear a bright, warm voice telling them the things they needed to know in the morning, along with a joke or two and some music.

For a time, they wanted to hear about what Ronnie and I had been up to, because everybody knew we were an item. They’d seen it happen on their TV sets, when I co-anchored a charity telethon with her, about a year after my divorce. We weren’t flamboyant, but we weren’t exactly discreet, either. For a year and a half, things had gone well. We’d started to talk about the future. I started thinking about a ring. Then, it all came crashing down.

I would forever remember it as The Bad Weekend. For a long time after that, every weekend was a bad one, although not quite as terrible as the first. There’d been the one a month after the Bad Weekend, when I’d gone out to a movie on a Saturday night, alone, then stopped at a bar for a drink before heading back to my empty apartment. I walked through the door and there she was, sitting at the bar with a man, and they were chatting and smiling. I didn’t recognize him, but he was obviously older than Ronnie by about ten, maybe fifteen years. Since she was in her mid-thirties at the time—she was eight months younger than me—that put him about fifty. Somehow, that made it even worse. Now, twenty years later, I’m about the same age he was, and I look at things like that a little differently. A part of me thinks that squiring around a beautiful woman that much younger than me would be just fine, but then I say to myself, “She wouldn’t be Ronnie, though, would she?”

I didn’t go into the bar that night. She might’ve seen me, maybe even called me over to introduce me to her date, sticking the knife in and twisting it. No, that wasn’t fair, she wasn’t like that, but she might’ve done the intro just to be polite. I couldn’t handle that, so I went home and killed a bottle of wine, all by myself.

Something even worse was yet to come. Six months later, I read in the La Crosse paper that she’d gotten married to the guy. Raymond Harvey was his name, and he was an executive with one of the city’s major banks. They tied the knot on a Caribbean island I’d never heard of. Three months after that, Ronnie announced one morning at the close of her newscast that she would be leaving the station at the month’s end and moving to the Cities with her husband. She’d be taking over the morning anchor chair for the top-ranked station over there, a big move up for her. The La Crosse newspaper had a story the next day about her move, adding that her new husband had been promoted to a high position at his bank’s national headquarters in St. Paul. “Well, they’re two-for-two,” I remember saying aloud as I carefully folded the paper before throwing it across my living room. What I didn’t say aloud was, “I’m oh-for-one.” Oh-for-two, actually, counting my divorce. Things weren’t really working out the way I’d planned.

I thought about calling her at work the next day, congratulating her on the new job, but I hadn’t called for her engagement, or her marriage. Why start now? A part of me said that the honorable thing to do was to pick up the phone, make the call, be a man about it. Maybe invite her to lunch, smooth over any rough patches still hanging around. You might never see her again, the voice said. Take the high road. That’s what your father would tell you to do.

But my dad was fishing up near Hayward right about that time, and although we’d had a few conversations about the breakup, I wasn’t interested in hearing about it from him anymore. John Fletcher, the former Seabee, had a way of cutting through the bullshit a little too sharply for me. I didn’t want to hand him the carving knife again. That, as it turned out, would come later.

The last time I saw her in person was the night of her going-away party, purely by accident. Her colleagues had gathered in the banquet room of a high-end bistro, which I happened to be dining at that evening with a woman I’d started seeing, and who I was really trying to like. I was getting there, too, until I excused myself to use the restroom. Coming back toward our table, I passed by the side room and heard Ronnie’s distinctive laugh, full and carefree, just as I’d remembered it. I had to stop and take a look inside, and at that very moment, she glanced toward the door.

We had a lot of those moments, when things just seemed to click. Unfortunately, this was one of them.

“Ben,” she said.

“Hey.” I knew my date was waiting back at our table, but at that moment, I didn’t care. All I cared about was that the woman who’d been the love of my life was right in front of me, and now she was walking toward me, and she was smiling.

David Tindell was born in Germany and grew up in southwest Wisconsin. Together with his wife Sue, he’s traveled the world, seeking new locales for his novels. He trains in the martial arts, dabbles in radio and joins Sue in the never-ending search for the perfect chai tea latte.

His latest book is The Dance We Shared (Book 3 in Men of Honor). Other books include The Heights of Valor (Book 1 in Men of Honor) and The Man In the Arena (Book 2 in Men of Honor.

Visit his website at www.davidtindellauthor.com.

Connect with him on social media at:

╰┈➤ X: www.x.com/davidtindell1

╰┈➤ Facebook: www.facebook.com/DavidTindellAuthor

╰┈➤ Instagram: www.instagram.com/djtindellauthor

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