“Oh!” Rob leaned forward in his chair. “But do you think the amnesia was real?”
“You think she was faking it?”
“No, like...” He thought about it for a few seconds. “After I read it, I was talking to my mom about it and she has a theory that the author couldn’t make the plot work and added the amnesia, like an afterthought.”
“Interesting. When I was thinking about the story, there were a lot of things that seemed inconsistent with amnesia, so I thought maybe the character was faking.” She growled in frustration. “It was such a good book, but I hate that in the domestic suspense genre, ambiguous endings are okay. Sometimes I guess they want us to draw our own conclusions, but other times I think the author wrote themselves into a corner and the ambiguity is meant to disguise a lack of ending.”
Two hours later, when Stella wandered into Hannah’s site, the two-person book club was in full swing. They’d even moved their chairs closer together until their legs were touching so they could flip through the book and find passages to back up their arguments.
When Stella nudged Rob’s thigh, he looked at his watch and realized how much time had passed. “I think this dog is trying to tell me Brian’s cursing my name right now. But let me know if you read the other one, okay?”
“Oh, I will,” Hannah said as she gave Stella a good all-over scratch.
In fact, Rob and the dog weren’t even out of sight before she had the app open, checking to see if she had a strong enough signal to download the book he’d recommended without walking up to the overflow lot.
If not, she’d make the walk because this was definitely her kind of book club.
Chapter Fifteen
By the following Tuesday, Rob still hadn’t managed to carve out time to go for a walk with Hannah. He had some free hours here and there, of course, but he didn’t want their time together to be rushed. And he wanted to make sure they had enough time so they could locate the spot she was looking for.
If that foundation was out there, he wanted to find it with her. For whatever reason, it seemed important to her, and that was enough for him.
He and Brian were in the house, relaxing after an unseasonably hot and humid day. It had felt more like August than early June, and since they’d been clearing some woods on the western side of the campground where they were hoping to add two more sites, they were beat.
“It’s not supposed to be this hot in June,” Brian said, giving the ancient and slightly inadequate window AC unit a sour look. “They said there’s supposed to be a bad, slow-moving storm, but that it was going to stay south of us.”
The words had barely left his mouth when a flash of lightning lit everything up for a few seconds. Stella bolted from her bed and launched herself onto Brian’s lap. She wasn’t exactly a lap-size dog, but Brian slid down the chair a little, making his lap as large as possible. The dog curled up in a ball while also managing to get her head under the hem of Brian’s T-shirt.
The thunder came in a long, low rumble.
“Way to summon the thunder,” Rob said. “Maybe you could manifest us a winning lottery ticket.”
“It wasn’t a gunshot, at least,” Brian said, his arms wrapped around Stella.
“Nope.” Rob sighed, going to look out the window. He couldn’t see Hannah’s camper from here. “Maybe we should assign somebody to pay more attention to the weather.”
“Again, they said it was going to miss us. They were wrong, obviously, but it’s not like we can change it.”
“No, but we could...” He let the words trail off because it was true. He couldn’t change the weather, even for Hannah.
The lights dimmed and then flickered, but the power didn’t go off. With a curse, Rob leaned closer to the window, but it didn’t matter. He still couldn’t see her site.
“Hannah’s terrified of thunderstorms.” He shoved a hand through his hair, remembering that she coped by turning on all the lights in the camper to minimize the lightning. If the power went out, the camper could run off the battery, but those lights weren’t as bright. And he was just worried about her. “I’m going over there.”
“The storm’s here. The sky’s going to open up any second and it’s going to rain like hell.”
“I don’t care.”
“You know the rules, Bobby.”
Rob clenched his jaw for a moment, stopping the harsh words that wanted to spew out. Then he took a deep breath before speaking. “I thought we weren’t doing that crap anymore.”
“I told you I wouldn’t give you a hard time, but Danny and Joey have both expressed some concerns about it.”
“What do they even know about it?”
“You know how they all talk down there. And were you trying to hide it? Because eating alone with her at the cookout and feeding her from your plate probably didn’t do you any favors.”
