I bob a shoulder. "He said it was ice. He said grief makes a man see designs in things, and that if I went hunting for a guilty party, then I'd burn down everything we'd built and probably get us all killed for nothing." I exhale. "He might have been right. He usually was. I looked anyway, quietly, for years. But I never found anything certain."
Caroline lifts her head. I can feel her looking at me in the dark.
"The ring," she says. "You never took it off."
"Never had a reason to."
Caroline is quiet as she thinks for a while. Then: "Was it Reznik?"
I turn so she can't see my face and everything it contains. "All I know is that, somewhere along the line, the trail went cold and the world went on. The only place she still exists is a photograph and the inside of my skull in the middle of the night."
"That's not the only place," Caroline disagrees.
"No?"
"She exists in this room right now. You just put her here."
19
CAROLINE
Regret hits me as soon as I say it. Did I go too far? Maybe it's not my place to say. Or maybe it was a stupid, empty platitude, insulting with how banal it was.
"Afon," I start to whisper, "I'm so sorry. I?—"
"Caroline." He turns his head toward me in the dark. "I don't want your sorries."
"Okay. Then what do you want? Tell me, and I'll?—"
He kisses me.
It's hungry and rough, maybe a little desperate, His hand comes up into my hair and holds me there while he takes my mouth apart. "That," he says when he breaks away for a moment. "That's what I want."
I gulp. "Are you sure…?"
He nods. "I've spent twenty years thinking about this shit, Caroline. I don't want to think anymore tonight. I want to stop.Just for a while. And you're the only thing in all that time that's ever made the noise go away."
My heart cracks straight down the middle.
"Okay," I whisper. "I'm yours. Whatever you need."
He kisses me again, harder. Even as I melt into it, I note that, somewhere south of my feet, there's a grumble and a thump and the bed gets a hundred and twenty pounds lighter.
"Did you just evict the dog telepathically?"
"He's polite," Afon remarks against my jaw. "Unlike someotherguests I've had."
"Rude. I'm an excellent guest. I patched your bullet hole."
"You talked the entire time."
"That's called bedside manner—oh."
His mouth has found the spot below my ear, and whatever I was going to say next closes up shop. His beard scrapes my throat. His hand drags up under the flannel—hisflannel, the one I've been living in—and spreads flat and hot across my stomach.
"This," he growls, "comes off."
"It's yours."
