Chapter Five
LIAM KNEWhe should be making plans. Either finding his own office space and staff or setting up meetings with other firms that would be interested in hiring him. He definitely needed to get in touch with old clients and give them his spin on the situation. He should be attending to business.
Instead, he got his car back from the shop and started driving again. North again,and then west. Again.
How many times had he made this trip over the years? All the way to the Welcome to North Falls sign, then loop around and drive home, because the sign was a lie and he wasn’t “welcome” in North Falls, not by a long shot.
But this time he drove straight past the sign. Down the south hill and over the bridge, and he pulled over for a moment to look down at the park wherehe and—where all of them used to hang out before they were old enough to have friends with driver’s licenses who could take them out to the lake. Wading in the mud by the riverside, dodging goose shit to find places to lie in the grass and gaze up at the sky. Talking without looking at each other and later, finally,touching, just hands or feet or other safe parts, still without looking at eachother.
Some real Mayberry shit. Except a couple years later, they’d started coming back to the park after dark. All their friends were at the lake, but this thing between them wasn’t for public consumption, not yet. Instead, they’d come to the park and found the shadows and they’d touched each other everywhere, hungry and confident. They’d gasped into each other’s mouths, strained into each otheras if trying to meld their entire bodies together. Ben’s face, pale and perfect in the moonlight, his eyes, so deep and trusting—
Yeah, trusting. You asshole. Don’t even think about him. You don’t deserve to.
Liam put the car back into gear and continued into town. The familiar stores, the bank, the church, the post office. How the hell did he manage to have memories of Ben from every singlebuilding? Sure, it was just the post officestepsthey’d spent time on, that summer after seventh grade when they’d all been into skateboarding and the three of them had spent endless hours trying to grind their ways down the metal handrail.
That had ended when Seth broke his collarbone and his and Liam’s parents outlawed any sort of stunting. Ben still could have practiced—he’d been living withUncle Calvin by then, and Calvin, while generally loving, departed from contemporary parenting wisdom in many ways. He’d been almost gleefully willing to let Ben learn by trying things and making mistakes. But it wouldn’t have been any fun for Ben to skateboard alone.
And there it was again. Liam was thinking about Ben. Seth too, but Ben, mostly.
He made it through town and up the north hill,turned left, and drove to the end of the dead-end street. A cul-de-sac, his mother had always called it, but Liam really wasn’t sure it qualified. Regardless of the precise designation, it had been a quiet street, except for when the big yellow house at the end of it hosted one of its frequent parties.
He pulled up on the shoulder and looked at the house. Did the same people own it, the oneswho’d bought it from his parents? They’d been the new medical team, two doctors to take over the clinic and the town GP practice.
Almost twenty years ago now—his parents had stayed in town until he finished high school, then headed off to semiretirement in South Carolina. During college he’d gone to visit them occasionally, always dragging Ben and usually Seth along with him, but for most breakshe’d returned to North Falls and stayed with Ben at Uncle Calvin’s, two of them crammed into Ben’s old single bed.
Yeah, Ben. Ben, Ben, Ben.
Was there an inch of this town not drenched in memories of Ben?
Maybe for some people, but not for Liam.
He did a quick U-turn and headed back into town.
See them as buildings, he told himself.Be an architect. Analyze the structure.
But there was nothingarchitecturally significant about the buildings, nothing interesting, even. His career had been dedicated to clean, modern design that made a statement. There was none of that here in North Falls.
He should go back to the city. That was where he belonged.
But he pulled over, as he’d known he would, outside the small-engine-repair shop. A two-story building with rented apartments on the secondfloor and a glass-fronted shop on the first. Lawn mowers and chainsaws and log-splitters on display in the front window, the inside of the building too dark to be visible from outdoors.
Liam sat for a moment and wrestled with his better judgment. Nothing he’d done so far was irreversible. Nobody had seen him; he had plausible deniability. His ignition had betrayed him the other day, but he hadno such excuse now.
He got out of the car anyway. It felt as if he wasn’t really making any decisions, just being swept along in a current of… fate? No, nothing so purposeful. Momentum, maybe. He’d set something in motion, and it was inclined to stay in motion. Shit, was that momentum, or inertia? Momentum had a better sound to it, but maybe inertia was more accurate, and somehow more fittingconsidering that he was in North Falls.
And what “something” was he thinking of, anyway, that he’d set in motion?
He pushed the door open, heard the bell chime, and smelled the familiar motor oil, the scent that had been carried home on Calvin’s clothes to perfume the little house where he and his nephew had lived. And not much else seemed to have changed either. The same displays of parts andtools, the same battered leather stools, and the same grizzled head poking up from behind the counter. Maybe a little less hair and a few more wrinkles, but the eyes were just as sharp. Just as perceptive.
And they showed absolutely no surprise.
“Liam.” Calvin gave him a cordial nod of greeting. “You got a haircut.”
Liam felt numb but fought to sound coherent. “I’ve had quite a few, I guess.But, yeah, my hair is shorter now. In general.” There, now that they had that taken care of, he could go back to the city and get on with his life.
“I heard you have a nice car.”
It wasn’t like Liam’s family had ever been short of money, but they’d been a bit less—a bit less ostentatious?—a bit less interested in high-performance vehicles. “It’s not a Ferrari or anything.”
