Lexie’s mother stands in the doorway, a toddler on her hip. She’s thrown into silhouette by the light at her back, but I can still see the contempt in her face. She’s aged well, looks strong and able, but there’s a bone-weary tiredness in those eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
I turn fully and face her. “Nice to see you too.”
“Fuck off.” The toddler on her hip, with Lexie’s blonde curls and wide blue eyes, blinks at me pensively. “Get out of here.”
“With all due respect, I’m not here for you.” I put steel in my voice, but give her a smile. I hope she reads in it the warning I intend. Nancy wasn’t around much for Lexie’s childhood. I’m grateful for that, in a way, because it meant Lexie spent that time with Margot and me and Milo. But it leaves me bereft in a way too, because I know how many hours Lexie still spent alone in that big empty house by the railroad tracks. “She home?”
“How dare you?” Nancy snarls. “How dare you show your fuckin’ face here after all these years?”
I flinch, surprised by the vitriol in her voice. Nancy never liked me, or really Margot for that matter, because of my dad’s history. I guess she probably only put up with us so she didn’t have to hire a babysitter. “Look, Lexie never came to see me either—”
“Like that ball was in her court? Jesus Christ. A waster and a deadbeat and criminal lowlife, just like your father,” she spits. “You take her virginity and leave her on the curb like fucking trash.”
Fuck. I didn’t think Nancy would know about me and Lexie. I’m surprised by how much anger lurches up in me at that, because she doesn’t get it, she doesn’t understand what Lexie and me had, what Ithoughtwe had. “Look,” I said, anger turning my voice cool and brittle. “You weren’t here. You don’t know what happened between us, but it’s not like that—”
“Oh, yeah? What, then, Liam? What’s it like?”
I loved her.
The words, wild and stupid, are on my tongue. But at that moment, before I can speak them, a voice comes from behind me, from the dark.
“Liam,” says Lexie’s familiar voice; calmly, pleasantly, like it’s the most common thing in the world to find me, after all these years and all this silence, locked in a verbal sparring match with her mother on their porch. “Isn’t this a lovely surprise?”
4
Lexie
One of the things I promised myself when I found out I was pregnant, was that nobody would know. This town is small and small-minded, and getting knocked up by a put-away gangster paints you in a certain light. I wasn’t ready for doors slamming in my face or filthy looks when I went into town.
And for all I knew—all Iknow—I was a good and forbidden and forgotten fuck for Liam Dunne, and that was it.
And anyway, I’d gone most of my life alone, looking after myself, looking after the people I loved. Sharing the burden of raising three kids felt like weakness, a split in the bone that was only going to widen until it broke and left me crippled. I had to steel up, toughen up. These kids, my girls, they needed me.
There have been times, naturally, over the last few years, where I’ve wished I had someone at my side. My mom was the only constant I had other than Ramsay, and even she was back and forth between town and the city. It wasn’t until the girls were one that she agreed to help out more regularly. By then I’d spent a small fortune on a local nanny so I could keep my job, and I could barely afford my place.
I’d had this vision in my head when I was younger, of living in a house just like this one, right up against the deep, black, wild woods, where I’d write in the morning sunlight and sell my books and live at my own pace. Now the vision is different: the girls are there, happy and brilliant and loud and all over me, and there’s a man somewhere, bringing me coffee and coercing the kids outside to play in the yard.
I don’t think I’ve ever admitted to myself that that dream man, that specter, wears Liam Dunne’s face.
And for still wanting him, still loving him, after all of this time—I hate myself.
Trouble. That’s what Mom called him after the first time he walked me home. Margot and I were thirteen, I think.That Dunne boy—nothing but trouble.If she knew he was the one who got me pregnant, not some college boy blow-in summoned straight out of my imagination and gone the next morning, she’d disown me.
I’ve been thinking about him the last few days, against everything in me. I’ve been asking myself if he’ll stay in town, if he’s laughing with Margot over a beer right now, if he’s wondering about me or has, even once, in the last three years.
And now, in the dark and cloying fog, here he is. Stepped out of my past like a ghost to haunt me. I half want to touch him to make sure he’s real.
“Lexie,” he says, on an exhale, and his voice makes my knees go weak.
He’s turned on the porch so the light is half-on him, half-off, and I can only tell that the boy who went to prison came out a man. He’s dangerously muscular now, totally filled out and broad-shouldered, and his rugged, handsome face is shadowed with the beginnings of a beard. His hair is short-cropped but growing out, dark and thick, and his eyes glint, smoldering, piercing, in the strange orange light.
Hunger yawns open inside of me, a familiar wistfulness that has made me breathless for years. I remember, so vividly, the way he touched me that night, in the movie theater. The way he laid me down. The way he went slow, with aching gentleness, fingers and hands and his tenacious, clever tongue.
Made love.I’d always hated that expression. It was naïve, and based on what I’d learned from Margot and Milo and TV, sex was anything but that—soft-edged and sanitized. I’d made it out in my head to be something horrible, animal, but Liam, when he took my virginity, treated me with a kind of lavish respect I couldn’t believe.
Over the years I’ve thought of him in different ways: wondered what he’d be like now, what we’d be like together. I haven’t had sex since then—isn’t that crazy? A virginal, chaste mother of three—and every time I’ve imagined it, and I’ve imagined ita lot, it’s been with him.
