In inimitable Rebecca Corday fashion, she’d picked her moment to maximize drama and publicity. She’d needed to punish him, and boy had she.
Five years ought to be long enough for another person to make a mark on you, to reshape you a little, he thought. Apart from feeling disoriented for a while—every relationship was like a culture of two, with its own language and customs—mostly he felt like he’d been evicted from a small, hot, noisy party.
And maybe that said more about him than it did about her. Maybe he was indeed the problem.
He didn’t pass a single other soul on the trail, unless you counted deer and squirrels, the former of which galloped off, the latter of which scolded him from high branches. A blue jay followed him for a time, from tree branch to tree branch, squawking. A hummingbird strafed him, then moved on, satisfied it had shown him who was boss. He didn’t encounter any mammals of the kind with fangs or claws, but that didn’t mean they weren’t in there, watching him.
He hiked past sheer drops—thoughtfully labeled by the Forest Service—and staggeringly beautiful vistas of the canyon, carved out by a relentless river.
He heard Full Moon Falls before she saw them. The low roar was like a lover’s breath in your ear when things were just starting to get hot.
He forgave his mind for still being a little one-track. Nature was all about sex and death, anyway.
The roar was growing louder when he stopped at a respectful distance by a tree that could only be the Eternity Oak. The thing was immense.
A little bronze plaque at its base verified his supposition.
He moved closer to it and discovered the Forest Service hadn’t splurged on any engraving to describe the legend.
But someonehadaffixed a little note to the plaque. Folded like a note card, attached with tape.
He lifted it to read.
Think twice, man,it said.
He laughed. His laugh echoed eerily.
The tree’s arms—branches, he corrected himself, but their graceful, twisting reach really did seem more like arms—spread way up and out, and the whole thing was as vast and intricate as an apartment complex or a little city, which it likely was for various forest fauna. Sun could hardly get through the branches, and when it did, it dappled the ground like a scattering of gold coins.
The place was arrestingly beautiful and as calm as a temple. And yet it made him a little nervous, as if there were something he needed to do in order to earn the right to even stand there. Like this was the Temple of True Love, or something, and he hadn’t paid the price of admission yet.
“Paid the price.” Now, there was a phrase calculated to chill a man’s blood.
He stepped closer to the tree.
On first inspection he saw only one set of initials.
ELB + GHG
But then he squinted, and an errant ray of late-afternoon sunlight picked out a few other sets of initials, scattered over it. He couldn’t read all of them clearly.
But one set was spotlit, set on a high branch, old and scarred now:
GEH + SLO
Who were they? He wondered what it felt like to be thatcertain. Or did their hands shake when they dug those initials into the tree?
He was pretty sure Felix Nicasio and Michelle Solomon would have no compunctions about carving their initials in that tree.
J. T. recalled an infamous article in the wake of his breakup: “Top Ten Reasons Rebecca Corday is better off without John Tennessee McCord.” The list read like some unholy brainchild of Rebecca’s publicist and her mother. Number Eight was, “He’s allergic to the ‘L’ word.”
Now, that was low. It wasn’t anallergy. He was more like... a self-proclaimed agnostic who refused to use the Lord’s name in vain, just in case he might be wrong. An awful lot of misery was perpetrated and endured in the name of love. Just look at what it had done to his mama, for instance. As far as he was concerned, the word deserved the type of fear and awe reserved for the Old Testament God.
He would have said it if he’d felt it.
Maybe hecouldn’tfeel it.
J. T. restlessly turned his back on those initials and the poor fools who’d carved them. He wanted to see the falls and get back before it got dark.
