Chapter 23
At about eleven o’clock the next day, as the mail truck trundled back down the road, Mac practically punched his hand into his mailbox. He swirled his hand around.
Nothing. Not even dust. Not even a spider.
He closed his eyes and swore softly. How much of this angst could have been avoided if Mike had just paid him back on time?
When he opened his eyes, Avalon was about ten feet away, heading toward the mailbox.
“How’d the visit with Corncob go? You kids patch things up?”
She stopped a good five feet back from him. As if she’d seen a dark object off in the distance, and she wasn’t certain whether he was a tree trunk or a bear.
She said nothing. Her hair was gathered up in a straggly ponytail and there were purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her face was pale but her mood was palpably dark.
Clearly she hadn’t slept any more than he had. And despite himself the idea that she was feeling wretched made him restless.
She clearly wasn’t glowing from a happy reunion, that was for sure. He knew a little unworthy thrill of pleasure at that.
“So did he leave?” He was conscious of pressing his luck but unable to help himself somehow. “You can’t hear a Prius leave. Sneaky little car for a sneaky little man.”
Before his eyes, her expression slowly evolved into one of black, incredulous amazement. It was like watching a time lapse of a bad, bad storm moving in.
She approached him, slowly. Slowly.
Very like she was stalking him.
She stopped at a distance he couldn’t reach across without moving toward her. “At leastheactually came looking for me,” she said. With such wounded, resigned bitterness he blinked.
“What the... what the hell isthatsupposed to mean?”
She seemed to weigh whether to answer the question. “It means, Mac, that if I hadn’t shown up here at Devil’s Leap more than a decade after you last saw me, apparently you were perfectly okay with never seeing me again. And I’m pretty sure if I left today, the same thing would be true.”
“What the—you disappeared onme, Avalon!”
He’d never said the words aloud to anyone in his life.
When he said them, he knew they summed up that core of pain lodged inside him. It had never budged, never shrunk. He’d only been able to armor it. He’d never said them because they were his biggest weakness.
“OfcourseI disappeared!” Pain all but howled through those words.
He didn’t think he’d ever known dread quite like this. Or maybe relief was a better word. It was whatever the guy facing a firing squad felt the second the triggers were pulled.
He had an epiphany then: He’d thought he was free before. And now he knew he wouldn’t truly be free until she said what she was about to say.
“So you did have a reason. For disappearing.”
The silence between them was seconds long, but miles dense.
“You remember that day... up in your parents’ room?” she said finally.
“It’s etched on my soul,” he could have said. “It’s the ‘before’ and ‘after’ dividing line of my life.” He just nodded.
“I ran into your dad when I went downstairs. He was surprised to see me, too. I had to say something, so I told him I was looking for the bathroom. He gave me directions to it. Then the phone rang in the kitchen. You came down to take the call. And then...”
“You eavesdropped,” he said with flat incredulity.
“...Do you remember what you said?”
