“I know.”
Speaking took a tremendous effort, and the monitor beeped half a dozen times before she tried again.
“Where are we?”
“Portland.”
Annie licked her chapped lips and attempted to raise herself from the bed. “Walt… he…”
Jake pushed her gently back down into the pillows. “I know. He’s in custody. They got a full confession out of him, and he’ll be put away for the rest of his life.”
Jake told her then what had happened after her world went dark, and Annie listened with strange detachment, feeling only a faraway sense of dismay when she realized how close she’d come to death. She could hear it in Jake’s voice, the disbelief, the sadness. He was still processing it all.
“Are you and Daniel okay?”
Jake nodded. “We will be.” He yawned and stifled it with a fist. “He’s been here for two days. I finally sent him home for some sleep last night.”
“That’s how long I’ve been out?”
Jake nodded, reaching out to brush her forehead again.
“I’m so sorry, Annie. About everything. I was so bullheaded about this whole thing. Certain I was right. Never in a million years would I have thought…”
His voice trailed away, and Annie tried to nod but couldn’t quite manage it. Instead, she gazed at him from the bed as his blue eyes filled with tears.
“You deserved a better father than him.”
They lapsed into a long silence, and Annie took his hand again.
“Thank you for saving my life. You’re a hero, Jake.”
Jake closed his eyes and his head dipped as he shook it. “I don’t feel like one. My life’s been turned upside down and I… honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to face the days ahead.”
Annie squeezed his hand gently. “It’s not the burden that breaks you. It’s whether or not you have someone to help you carry it.”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, and something in Jake’s face changed, a peace dawning there that she had not seen since that awful day in the woods. With a small smile, he let go of her hand and rose from the chair.
“I’ll go tell the nurse that you’re up. And I’ll give Daniel a call, too. He’ll want to know you’re awake.”
“Wait. Don’t call him yet. There’s something I need you to do for me first.”
Chapter 45DANIEL
In the peaceful stillness of late afternoon, Daniel walked up Lake Lumin Road.
Pinched under his arm were the nineNO TRESPASSINGsigns that had lined the quarter-mile stretch leading up to the clearing, and tucked in his back pocket was the hammer he’d used to wrench their nails free.
As he stepped into the clearing, he stretched out a hand to brush the jagged, broken hinges attached to the fence post. The gate was gone, and the gap it left behind continued to catch his eye like a missing tooth, but, somehow, he knew that he’d never replace it. He was done barricading himself from the rest of the world. Done barricading his heart, starved of love since his youth.
He carried the signs to the bonfire he’d left roaring in the circle of stones and dropped them into the flames, then hopped up onto the dock and reclaimed his seat in the Adirondack chair. Smiling, he reached for his sketch pad and flipped it open to the drawing he’d been working on since sunrise.
It had come to him in the basement of the church, and it was the first time in his life he’d sketched something he had not seen. Something imagined. Something he hoped would one day be.
It was Annie, older than she was now, with her hair loose around her face, standing beside the lake, looking back at him over her shoulder with a smile on her lips. A vision. A dream. A future.
Daniel etched fine lines of patience and determination into her features and shaded with soft shadow, but his gaze kept sliding up past the top of the paper to the lake beyond, the silken surface pearled with late-afternoon light.
He’d almost lost her. He’d almost lost Annie to this very lake, and he would never be able to repay Jake for saving her life, though they had about fifty years’ worth of fishing weekends for him to try.
