"I knew it the moment I saw your face through that window." It's dark in here, but I can still see his outline well enough to know he's gazing straight up overhead. "I looked up from the sink just in time to see your face for a split second before you fell, and I thought—" He stops. The mattress shifts, a small crunch, his weight settling. "I thought,There she is.Like I'd been waiting. Like some part of me had been standing at that window for months, waiting for you to walk out of those trees."
Thock. Thock.That's my heartbeat now.
"And I knew," he continues, "that I wouldn't be able to let you go. I tried. I drove you to that bus stop and I told myself it was finished. I was halfway back up the mountain before I admitted I was lying. I have lied to interrogators and bosses and priests, Caroline. I have lied to men holding guns to my head. The onlyperson I've never managed to lie to is myself, and the lie I wanted most wasShe'll be fine. Soon enough, you'll forget her."
The darkness is making this confession possible. In it, we can be anyone, anything. Even the hardest things of all to become: ourselves.
"That's why I'm reluctant to tell you the story," he concludes. "Not because I'm a coward, despite what you may think. But because, once you know everything, you'll get up and you'll walk back out of those trees, and this time it'll be forever. And I'll deserve it. I don't know if I'm ready for that."
I don't say anything. For once in my perseverating, magna cum laude life, I understand that words would be the wrong tool for the occasion.
Instead, I reach across the Berlin Wall.
My hand finds his forearm first, then travels down over those scarred knuckles, and I slide my fingers between his. For one terrible second, his whole hand goes rigid, and I think he's going to pull away, retreat to the tarp, go outside, and chop the entire forest down rather than let me have this.
Then his fingers close around mine. He laces us together over the rolled blanket and holds on.
The wind picks back up. Wolf sighs against my feet. Then, holding the hand of a man who carries my family's secrets inked on his ribs, I finally fall asleep.
I wake to gray light and an empty bed.
The sheets beside me are cold as the grave. The Berlin Wall has been folded and returned to the duffel, like our whole night and all it contained has been tidied away. Wolf is still on my feet, snoozing happily, but the hut is otherwise empty.
"Afon?"
Nothing.
I sit up, and that's when I see him.
He's at the tree line, maybe thirty yards out, standing in snow up to his shins. Dead-still in a way that no living thing should be able to manage. The Remington is up, stock welded to his shoulder, barrel level and unwavering, aimed at something deep in the trees.
As I watch, he fires.
Andruns.
15
AFON
The deer drops where it stands.
It's a young buck, maybe a hundred and forty pounds, and it was browsing the low cedar at the edge of the ravine when I spotted it through the trees. One shot, just behind the shoulder. It folds into the snow and doesn't get up.
I lower the gun and run to it. A wounded deer can travel half a mile on adrenaline, and I don't have the time or the energy to track a blood trail through two feet of powder.
But there's no need. The buck is dead before I reach it. Clean kill, no pain for the creature. Its eyes are already going glassy.
"Sorry, friend," I tell it. "But we're out of beans worth eating, and the lady doesn't strike me as the type who forages."
I kneel beside it and get to work. I've field-dressed more deer than I can count, and my hands know the job without my brain needing to participate. Knife in. Open the cavity. Roll it to drain. The steam comes off the carcass in the cold morning air and my fingers go red and slick.
I keep my mind on the task because the alternative is thinking about last night.
About her hand in mine.
About the things I said in the dark.
Clenching my teeth, I press harder on the knife and keep cutting.
