Damaged

by Pamela Callow

  She lifted her chin. “I never said that.”

  “You said you didn’t want to depend on anyone.” He didn’t add the rest she’d said that night: that it was obvious she couldn’t depend on him.

  “That’s different.”

  “No.” Ethan crossed his arms. “It’s not.”

  He wanted to fight.

  All the hurt she’d buried rose to the surface like fat in a boiling pot. Long-rehearsed responses to the accusations he’d hurled on New Year’s Eve welled in her throat.

  But she didn’t speak. She’d had four months of pain searing its scabs onto her heart. Opening up old wounds just made the scars deeper. They’d damaged each other enough.

  She tried to give a casual shrug. “I didn’t ‘get’ Alaska. He found me.”

  “He found you?” Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “Where, in the park?” As soon as the words came out, he looked as if he’d wished he could take them back.

  She wished he could.

  In the park. Where they’d met. Sunshine dappling through pine trees onto the graveled path. She was tying her shoelace, sweat dripping down her brow, her breath coming fast from the long run up Serpentine Hill. He was behind her; she’d noticed him down by the water, noticed him noticing her. When their eyes met, that was it. She had the sensation she had transcended her ordinary life and had entered a plane she’d never known existed. A plane where hope was suddenly, giddily, within her grasp.

  “No.” She struggled to speak through the tightness in her throat. “He used to live here. With the previous owner. When she died, he went to live with the owner’s niece, but he kept coming back and sitting on the porch. I only adopted him last week.” Rain trickled down Kate’s neck. A damp chill settled around her. Along with a weariness. Couldn’t Ethan see there was no point in this? They’d said too many things to each other that couldn’t be taken back. The fragile trust they had forged together over six months of passion had been irreversibly severed. “I’ve gotta go.” She turned up the walkway. Then added over her shoulder, “Please don’t come here again.”

  The finality of her words seemed to shock Ethan out of his anger. “Wait.” He lunged toward her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to argue with you.”

  “Really?” She didn’t bother to hide her bitterness.

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I found this the other night and thought you might be missing it.”

  Gold flashed as it fell from the open envelope onto the pavement.

  Her breath stuck in her throat. A round gold circle gleamed against the wet sidewalk.

  The ring.

  He swore and dove to pick it up, holding it out to her on his palm. Her pulse jumped back into her veins. It was a gold hoop earring. She’d lost it a few weeks before the party.

  She forced herself to breathe slowly. Had he seen her face when the earring fell? She hoped God was giving her this one small break and Ethan hadn’t.

  She picked the earring off his palm. His eyes remained fixed on her hand. He knew she was doing her best not to make contact with his skin.

  “Thanks.” She slipped it into her pocket. She’d throw it away as soon as she got inside. “I appreciate you returning it.” She turned to go.

  “Kate, wait.”

  She paused, pressing her hand against her side, twisting her fingers in Alaska’s leash.

  “We need to talk.” He glanced at her house. Obviously hoping she’d invite him inside.

  She shoved a soggy strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t want to talk. I think we’ve said enough.” Before she cracked and the mess of her past came spilling out onto the sidewalk.

  He crossed his arms. “That’s the whole problem.”

  “What?”

  “You think you’ve said enough when you’ve said nothing at all.”

  “There isn’t anything more to say.”

  “I want answers, Kate. I want to know why you never told me about your father.”

  His eyes bore into hers. She could see he felt he was justified in demanding the truth. That it was owed to him. Her own anger began to simmer.

  “I didn’t need to say anything. Vicky filled you in pretty thoroughly, if I recall.”

  His jaw tightened. “Only because you didn’t. How could you not tell me about your dad going to jail?” His voice hardened. “And about your sister?”

  The weight in her chest got heavier. She hated what he was doing to her. Bringing to the surface all the emotions she’d successfully smothered since they’d broken up. “I wasn’t trying to…” She stopped abruptly. She sounded like a kid weaseling her way out of trouble. “It was never the right time.”

  “We saw each other several times a week for six months, Kate!”

  “I know…” She’d wanted to tell him. She’d wanted to come clean about her past. But every time the moment seemed right, he’d hush her words with a kiss. And the kiss inevitably led to more…

  He had been just as reluctant as she to burst the romantic bubble that had floated them beyond their pasts, their presents. He just didn’t want to admit it. He wanted to blame it all on her.

  The leash was twisted so tightly around her fingers she could feel them growing numb. It was good. Numb was good. Because if she wasn’t numb, her anger would boil over.

  She could feel his eyes boring into her. “So when were you planning to tell me? After I put my ring on your finger?”

  His innuendo pushed her over the edge. “Are you suggesting I tried to trick you into marrying me?”

  Christmas Eve, on his knee, his grandmother’s ring. The memory punctured her.

  She’d managed to say yes through her tears. Then spent the rest of the Christmas holidays in agony. Terrified he would reject her if she told him about her past.

  It was his turn to look away. “I didn’t mean you were tricking me…”

  “Really? It sounded like that to me.”

  “It’s just when you put two and two together…” He jammed his hands into his pockets. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I don’t know!” Alaska sensed her agitation and whined deep in his throat. “I was waiting for the right time.” How could she explain when she didn’t know herself? It was outside her realm of experience. Everything. The sudden consuming passion, his adoration of her, his love of life that made everything seem vibrant, rich, good.

  “There never would have been a right time for something like that.” His brusque tone forced her back to the present. “You should have just told me.”

  “I knew it would ruin things between us.” It had. She’d been right.

  “It only ruined things because you lied to me.”

  “I didn’t lie!” Her fingers curled into themselves.

  “Lying by omission.”

  She stared at him. In the space of four months, he’d gone from being her lover to her accuser.

  Her pulse began to pound in her temples. “You just can’t deal with the fact that the future wife of a homicide detective has a father who is a convicted embezzler.”

  He crossed his arms. “It’s not just your father, Kate.”

  She stiffened. She knew where he was going with this. Her rage flooded her. She welcomed it. “What do you mean?”

  “I need to know what happened with your sister.”

  She raised her chin. “Vicky couldn’t find the report?”

  “Why are you making this so bloody difficult?” A corresponding anger tightened his face. “I just want to know what happened.”

  “You think I’m guilty, don’t you? You think if I refuse to tell you, I did something wrong.”

  “It sure as hell makes me wonder!”

  “You know what, Ethan? I’m tired of you treating me like a fucking suspect.”

  “And I’m tired of you treating me like a fucking idiot. Didn’t you even think about the fact all your ‘secrets’ were on the public record? That I would eventually find out?”

  “Don’t patron
ize me. You have no idea what I went through.” She tugged on Alaska’s leash and stumbled to the front porch stairs.

  He called after her, “You’re right. I have no idea. Because you won’t tell me.” His voice rose. “This is about trust, goddamn it. If you can’t even tell me the truth…”

  She stopped abruptly. She hadn’t been able to tell him the truth four months ago. But, by God, she’d tell him now. Let him know just how lucky he was to have gotten away from her. She turned around. “You want the truth?”

  He said softly, “Yeah. I do.”

  “Fine.” You’re opening Pandora’s box, baby, but it’s your choice. She took a deep breath. Made her voice flat. “Here’s the story.”

  Her eyes forced him to hold her gaze.

  “When I was sixteen I killed my sister.”

  He flinched. “The report says you were driving. The car crashed.”

  “I was speeding. I killed her.”

  It was as simple as that. A blink of an eye. A life gone.

  “Are you satisfied now?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Ethan had gotten the truth. Whether he could live with it was another question. She pulled out her house keys, fumbling. The leash tangled in her fingers.

  “Kate. I’m sorry.” His words sounded hollow.

  “I don’t think you are. You got what you came for. Now go.”

  “Kate…”

  “Go!” She refused to look at him. She put the key in the lock. She heard him retreat haltingly down the walkway, his car door close, the engine squeal to life.

  She pushed open the front door. The swollen wood stuck and then released suddenly. She pitched forward into the hallway. “Fuck!”

  Alaska ran through to the kitchen, leaving muddy footprints and trailing his leash behind him. She caught a glance of herself in the antique hallway mirror. Her eyes, ringed with smudged mascara, stared back at her. She headed into the kitchen.

  Alaska paced by his food bowl. He gave an expectant whine. She snatched his water dish from the floor. Water sloshed onto her fingers. “Fuck!” She banged the water dish onto the counter. Water splattered her T-shirt. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  Her fingers were shaking. She leaned against the counter, head down, breathing deeply until the anger leached from her body. So much for celebrating her new case.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw Alaska watching her by his food bowl. “Sorry, boy,” she said wearily. “You’ve been way too patient with me. I won’t do this again.”

  She grabbed the bag of Kibbles ’n Bits from the cupboard, shame at her outburst overriding her anger at Ethan. She poured extra food into Alaska’s bowl. He lunged forward and gobbled it hungrily.

  She had no appetite, but she knew she should eat something. She needed protein for her run tomorrow morning. Not only that, the bottle of wine on the counter beckoned her, and if she drank on an empty stomach she’d end up on the kitchen floor.

  She popped a frozen lasagna in the microwave. It was the last one. She needed to get to the grocery store. The thought of it exhausted her. She needed to get to bed. As soon as she ate, she’d have a hot bath and go to sleep.

  Alaska gave his food bowl one last lick and began to circle in front of the kitchen door. She let him out, watching the husky trot across the back porch down to the yard. He loved nosing around the overgrown shrubs, chasing the cats that slinked along the tattered garden bed. She turned from the door and poured a glass of wine.

  The microwave beeped. She pulled her dinner from the oven. The pasta was limp under the unnaturally red sauce. The cheese looked stringy, not brown and bubbly.

  A high-pitched howl split the air.

  She started, tipping the tray. The lasagna slid over the plastic edge and fell to the floor.

  “Fuck!”

  There was another howl.

  “Alaska?” The only sound she’d ever heard him make was whining.

  A shiver snaked up her spine. She stepped around the splattered pasta and opened the back door.

  Alaska crouched under the porch light, tiny drops of rain electrifying his fur. A low growl rumbled through bared teeth. His ears were erect, quivering.

  She followed his intent gaze. And froze.

  A hooded figure slipped out of her yard.

  She ran across the back porch. A rotting board groaned under her weight. Alaska followed at her heels. When her stocking feet hit the steps, slick with rain and moss, she slipped and stumbled to her knees. By the time she scrambled to her feet, sanity returned. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be chasing this guy. That was a job for the police. It was too late, anyway—the intruder had disappeared.

  “Damn it.” She stood panting in her yard. The street was empty. Quiet. Dark. Rain fell, washing away any footsteps that might have revealed themselves. She wrapped her arms around her middle.

  Alaska nosed her thigh and she patted him. “Good dog.” She walked slowly around the side of her house, glad for Alaska’s presence, though she had to admit he wasn’t attack-dog material.

  She wished she had an alarm system but she wouldn’t be able to afford one for at least another year, if then. The leaky roof and even leakier kitchen pipes had taken precedence. She stepped back inside. Alaska rushed by her straight to the lasagna. Within seconds it was gone. She couldn’t eat, anyway. Fear constricted her stomach into a tiny ball.

  Ethan. He was probably at home. She could call him and he would be at her house in five minutes. The cop in him would make sure she was safe.

  Safe, but not forgiven.

  She swallowed and reached for the phone.

  The 911 operator answered on the first ring.

  “I’d like to report an intruder,” Kate said.

  6

  Monday, April 30, 6:21 a.m.

  Kate watched Alaska trot across the dew-soaked grass of Point Pleasant Park. The ocean lapped its edges, funneling on one side into the Halifax Harbour, narrowing into the Northwest Arm on the other. By summer, the long blue arm of water would be dotted with dinghies, yachts and tour boats, people admiring the beautifully terraced properties of Halifax’s finest homes.

  She picked up her pace. God, it was hard today. Her body just didn’t want to do it. But she needed to. She needed to get Ethan out of her head. She had woken on Saturday with a throbbing headache. Memories of chasing the intruder and giving the police a statement were like a bad hangover fueled by her confrontation with Ethan. For the first time in months she had skipped her Saturday morning run. Her run on Sunday morning didn’t help dislodge the sluggishness in her limbs. She could barely concentrate on the TransTissue file. She had to force herself to sort through the facts and draft a memo to make John Lyons take note. The effort came with a price. Here it was, Monday morning, 6:21 a.m., and she felt completely drained.

  Knowing that she had to go to LMB in less than two hours and prove her legal mind was as good—or better—than all the other first-year associates made her resent Ethan’s unannounced visit even more. He had distracted her from the biggest file of her career. He had dragged her back to a place she had no desire to be.

  He wouldn’t let it go. He claimed he had come for answers, but she had seen his eyes. He wanted more than that. He wanted to make her pay for what had happened on New Year’s Eve.

  Her feet pounded in a punishing rhythm on the path. They had run together, their strides in sync. He loved running as much as she did. She had been used to doing it alone, letting her thoughts fly around her, but she had found herself enjoying his company. She’d think about the night before. How he’d seduced her with his reverential touch on her body. And then she’d feel the power in her body as she ran with him side by side.

  How could she take one of those fairy-tale moments with him and ruin it with the sordid details of her past? Her past was something she kept locked in a very dark, deep box. Putting voice to it made it real again.

  It had scared her. Terrified her. Admitting what she’d done to this man she loved so desperately. Ethan saw life in
black-and-white. The only thing she saw in black-and-white was death. Everything else was shades in between.

  In the gray of the early morning, the massive anchor of the sailors’ memorial loomed a shade darker than the colorless water. Alaska skirted around it, then bounded across the wide stretch of grass toward the old stone fort. The fort had been one of the first lines of defense for Halifax during the two World Wars. It was crumbling now, overgrown with hillocks. Yet it retained a sober dignity, a memorial to long-ago trauma.

  The fort was disintegrating. Just like the barriers she’d spent her adult life molding around her heart. They were suddenly becoming thin, porous, easily breached. It wasn’t just Ethan. Although he’d given it a good hammering on Friday. The breach had started before that. When she realized she could never outrun her past. When she looked at the calendar and saw that the date was finally arriving.

  The fifteenth anniversary of her sister’s death. It gave her life a special symmetry. She had had fifteen years of being loved by her sister, and then had spent fifteen years living with the knowledge that she had killed the one who had loved her most.

  A wind brushed her cheeks, damp and chill, pulling her out of her reverie. She glanced toward the horizon. Sure enough, a fog bank crept under the rising sun. Its edges smudged the dark band of fir trees on MacNab’s Island. Within an hour it would billow over the water, blanketing the navigational buoys, concealing the treacherous Hen and Chickens Shoal off the end of the park that still caught yachts in its teeth. Then the low groan of the foghorns would fill the air. She usually liked the sound of them: deep, unearthly. So different from the shrill noises of modern technology.

  But she was glad they weren’t sounding today. She didn’t need the mournful warning that the fog of her childhood was about to descend on her. That the ghost of her sister was running right on her heels.

  She couldn’t shake her. Nor could she shake the feeling that she was letting down another fifteen-year-old girl. One whom she hadn’t met, but who appeared to be going down a road that Kate had glimpsed before. On the night of Imogen’s death. When she found her fifteen-year-old sister in the back porch of a house party, with a mirror, a razor blade and a mound of white powder. She’d tried taking Imogen away.