“Then don’t,” she suggested, feeling a twinge of desperation. She’d been so careful to avoid him since that day in the barn, just hoping he’d forget the whole thing. “Turn around and walk out of here, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”
He smiled, and it kind of broke her heart. “I can’t do that,” he said quietly. “Forget.”
“Oh.” Cordelia clamped her lips together.
“I’m giving my notice,” he said, looking resigned. “I’ll pack up and find a place I can lease. Maybe try New York City or Boston. See if I can squeeze back into the music scene.”
Cordelia shook her head. “You’re leaving?”
“You and your sister will find someone else to help you with this place.”
She lowered herself onto the pond’s retaining wall. “I can’t believe this.”
He took a step toward her. “It’s just time for me to move on. I’ve been here this whole past year thinking that if I stayed long enough, I might understand what happened to my mom. But…”
Cordelia stared up into his face.
He looked torn, as if there were so much he wanted to say to her. Instead, he took a breath. “There are some things I’m never gonna understand, and the longer I’m here, the more complicated it gets.”
She nodded.Of course.That’s all she was to him—a complication. A misunderstanding. All this time she and her sister had been trying to piece together the sordid puzzle of their family, Gordon had been trying to solve his own mystery. He couldn’t help her with theirs any more than she could help him with his. She was just getting in the way. “If that’s how you feel.”
He looked at her, regret creasing his mouth.
Pity made her uneasy. She folded her bruised feelings into an imaginary envelope and put them away. She should have known. Her sister had always told her her picker was broken. Standing, she brushed the pond scum from her rear and squared her shoulders. “I’ll talk to Mr. Togers about issuing a final payment.”
He sniffed, stiffening.
“If we’re lucky,” she said now, a cold storm brewing in her eyes, “he’ll be quick about it.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, turning her cattiness on her. “He can mail the check. I wouldn’t dream of dragging this out. For either of us.”
Cordelia took a deep breath and turned her back. As she marched toward the kitchen, she held the image of the rune she’d seen in her mind, the brackish taste of the water in her mouth, and the anger she felt inside her chest, loosing them together at once.
“Fuck!” she heard him call as she hit the kitchen door, thesound of water ringing through her, and the image of him standing there dripping wet and covered in scum bringing an evil little smile to her lips.
And that’s when she realized that the headache she’d endured ceaselessly the last three days had mysteriously improved.
It hadn’t just improved, in fact. It no longer hurt at all.
CORDELIA HAD SCARCELYcleared the kitchen door when she heard his forced laughter echo toward her. Her heart seized, gripped in a frigid fist, before rushing headlong into full panic mode. But her brain held squarely to the belief that she was mistaken in some way.
Because it couldn’t be.
It just couldn’t.
Swallowing down the bitter dread that threatened to rise with breakfast, she moved through the dining room toward the stair hall, every second drawing out impossibly long. She could hear him explaining himself to Eustace—something about apersonal deliveryandresolutionandnever too late.The blood drained from her face and puddled in her feet. With a deep breath, she cracked the door until her head peeked out, eyes meeting her sister’s across the room.
Eustace’s face was a muddle of anger and apology. “Would you look at what the tomcat dragged in?” she said, blowing Cordelia’s cover.
He turned around, and Cordelia spotted the large cardboard box sitting between them on the floor, the ones still resting at the open door. The layers of shipping tape were painstakingly applied as only Molly would do, and the design of it all began to fall into place for her then. Somehow, he’d intercepted Molly’s attempt to ship her things and taken it upon himself to bring them.
“Cordelia!” He beamed, his smile like the brights on a car, hisskin bronzed across the nose and cheeks from a few rounds of golf, days lying on the beach in the sun.
The very sight of him made her want to gag. She emerged from the dining room and took several steps in their direction. Behind her, she heard Gordon pass from the kitchen to the stair hall door, coming up short when he saw everyone as he entered the room. “Everything all right?”
A thousand different words were piling up in her mouth at once like cars in a freeway crash. If she opened it, she had no idea which would escape first. “What are you doing here, John?”
“Yeah,” her sister echoed. “Whatareyou doing here, John?”
