by Nicole Baart
Didn’t passion, at its root, come down to a burning desire to know? I want to know you. I want to know how. I want to know why.
Yes, Lucas knew passion.
They turned off the paved road and crushed gravel beneath the tires of Lucas’s car. Each ping of sand and rock against the undercarraige made him cringe, but the tightness in his chest had nothing to do with his vehicle. He could feel Angela’s gaze on his face as surely as if she had laid a cool palm on his cheek. His hands began to sweat, but he didn’t know why.
“You’re wrong,” he told her, refusing even a peek in her direction. “I know passion.”
“I never said you weren’t passionate,” Angela assured him. He thought he could detect a hint of humor in her voice. “I said I couldn’t imagine you following a passion to its conclusion. There’s a big difference.”
Though he wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, Lucas felt a pinch of self-reproach twist behind his ribs. For a split second he was sure that Angela knew about the ring, that she was referring to the cowardice of carrying it around in his pocket like some sort of charm. But she couldn’t know, and in a small avalanche of understanding, Lucas realized she was referring to Jenna. To its conclusion . . . What was that supposed to mean? Of course he’d follow his wife anywhere. Of course his passion for her would last until the bitter end. His heart began a dizzying downward spiral. The end? Of what? His marriage?
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t expect you would.”
When Lucas pulled into the long driveway of the farm, he was repulsed at the sight of all the yellow tape, draped everywhere, almost decorative somehow, like hopeful ribbons tied to trees as if their cheering presence alone could coax a soldier home. But Jim wasn’t coming back, and Lucas wondered if Angela had ever considered this place home. The flapping strips would have felt like an affront, a downright mockery of all that had happened if they hadn’t been emblazoned with the sobering words: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.
“Can’t you take that down?”
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “You know, I would have been done here a long time ago if I hadn’t spent my first three days chatting it up with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who thought he had something to contribute to the case. They don’t. Have anything to contribute, that is.”
“And you do?”
She gave him a shrewd look as she unbuckled her seat belt. “I’m systematically going through every scrap of paper, every unpaid phone bill, every forgotten corner, in search of some sort of a clue. I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I’m not finding anything, if that’s what you mean. But, I’m not going to stop until I do.”
“Didn’t DCI already do that?”
“Yup. But they don’t know my dad.”
“How long will you let this thing drag out?”
“As long as it takes.”
Lucas was flummoxed. “Are you kidding me? You have a life in California. A good life. You love it there. You hate it here.”
“Right on all counts,” Angela acquiesced, but the rigid line of her narrow back told him that she wouldn’t give up until she found what she was looking for.
“You’re crazy.”
“No, although I’m doing something crazy.”
“Why?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and put a hand to her forehead as if she was offering a prayer for patience. “You’re a broken record, Lucas.”
“I try.”
“To understand, right?”
“Always.”
“I’m going to try one more time,” Angela said, waving her finger as evidence of this final attempt at explanation. There was a trace of a smile on her face, but when she tried to muster the right vocabulary to encompass the breadth of her desire to know what had happened beneath the floor of her father’s barn, she frowned. Lucas watched as she aged in the span of a heartbeat. All at once she seemed very tired, and though her face was still soft and unlined, she looked old beyond her years. “I don’t want to live like this for the rest of my life,” she whispered, her voice failing her.
“Like what?”
“Like the unloved daughter of a murderer.”
Her admission sucked the air out of the overheated car. Suddenly Lucas was hot, and he reached to turn down the heat and put the transmission in park. He thought about cracking open the window, but it seemed insensitive. He wondered if she would interpret the action as an insult, as if he didn’t want to breathe the same air as the daughter of a coldblooded killer.
“You’re not the daughter of a murderer,” Lucas comforted her, but there was no erasing what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, the truth.
“You’re right,” Angela asserted, lifting her chin slightly. “I’m not. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to prove.”
Although he couldn’t claim to get it, Lucas felt a wave of pity build in him like the overpowering rush of a rising tide. He fought to keep the emotion buried deep in his gut where it couldn’t spill out into his face because he knew that if Angela caught a whiff of his pitying sympathy she’d hate him forever. His features remained stony. She could never know that his heart broke for the little girl she was and the fragile woman she had become. And she could never know that he had the audacity to consider her fragile.
Lucas wanted to help—didn’t he always? But there was nothing he could say to soothe the unending sting of her personal history. In fact, words eluded him entirely.
Neither of them spoke, but Angela didn’t make any move to get out of the car, and the two of them sat side by side, staring out the windshield, for what felt like a very long time. Lucas squinted at the gloomy landscape before him—the wiry trees, the long brown grass, the broken edges of the neglected farm that bespoke the disregard it had endured—and was quietly surprised when an answer of sorts seemed to present itself.
He could help her.
It was with a sense of embracing the inevitable that Lucas dug his fingers deep into the pocket of his wool pants. There was a certain fatefulness in the air, as if everything that had happened before was for the benefit of this one moment, and he experienced an instant of profound peace as his forefinger hooked the thin, gold band. Lifting it to the muted light of the car, he held it out to Angela.
She glanced at the ring. Glanced at him. Back to the ring. “You’re giving me a ring?” she asked, incredulous.
“It’s not yours?” he said, breathless as he waited for her answer.
“No.”
Lucas exhaled. “Then yes, I guess I am giving you a ring.”
“I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
“All right, I’m not giving you a ring,” he muttered. “At least, not like that.” He waved it at her, teasing her with it. “Take it.”
“No.”
Lucas groaned. “Would you please just take it? You have no idea how hard it is for me to pass it on to you.”
Angela put her palm out for the ring and Lucas dropped it into her hand. She closed her fingers around it for a second, then plucked it out with the thumb and index finger of her other hand. “It’s pretty,” she said, studying it. “It’s Black Hills gold, right?”
“I think so.”
“And you bought it for Jenna?” Angela framed her inquiry with a hard, skeptical look. “You want me to tell you it’s nice? To tell you it’s a good pick for her? I don’t really know her taste.”
“It’s not for Jenna,” Lucas dissented. “It’s for you.”
“I don’t want it—”
“It’s yours,” he interrupted, refusing to take it back.
“I don’t want it.”
“Yes, you do. It’s your clue.”
16
MEG
As they kissed, the snow blanketed the world around them, softening the edges and hiding their indiscretion behind a modest veil of soft gray-white. It seemed to Meg as if a dam had burst, and knowing that Dylan was here with her now was a furious erosion of all
that had come before. Their failed friendship and the years of distance between then and now dissolved when his lips met hers; they admitted without uttering a single word that this was what they had wanted all along.
Meg drank him in, leveled by the urgency of her need for him and the raw longing that made it almost impossible to tear herself away. Finally, she thought, catching the fabric of his shirt in her fingers. “I’ve waited so long,” she mouthed against the warmth of his neck. And though she didn’t allow herself the luxury of the words, everything inside her acknowledged: This is good. This is right.
“Where did this come from?” Meg whispered when they finally forced themselves to break away from each other.
But Dylan didn’t answer. He rubbed his head as if massaging away a headache, and turned to peer out the windshield with the mystified look of a dreamer waking from a deep sleep. His forehead was creased, his eyes slightly narrowed, but when he put the truck in drive to take her home, he reached for her hand. Holding her fingers as if he hoped to crush them into his own, to make her a part of himself through pressure alone, he made the agonizingly short trek from the soccer pitch to her parents’ driveway. The drive was silent, but Meg’s head hummed with the thrill of what had happened, the whir of song inside of her lending a surreal quality to the night.
By the time Dylan pulled into her driveway, they had separated, but Meg still tingled in the place where his hand had pressed hers. She felt intoxicated, heavy-limbed but light-headed, and she asked him again, “What just happened?”
Dylan didn’t say anything at first. He sat staring straight ahead, both of his hands white-knuckled on the wheel and his face carefully expressionless. If she hadn’t known him so well, Meg would have imagined that he was angry about what had happened, what he had allowed himself to do. But she knew his aloof stance had nothing to do with regret. He simply couldn’t bring himself to look at her. The air in the cab of the truck was vibrating with the possibility of what might be. Meg could almost feel his hands around her waist, in her hair, tracing the curve of her ear as if he was actually touching her instead of just thinking about it. The electricity between them was compelling enough to make her knot her hands in her own lap and sit with her back pressed to the passenger door, far away from him because she couldn’t trust herself to be close.
After the ferocity of their moments alone, it was sobering to be in her driveway. Her mom and dad were behind the bamboo shutters in the living room, and Jess’s parents were at their backs, sentries across the cul-de-sac who could destroy the unexpected sanctuary of the truck that now held their secret. Meg was grateful for the dark sky and the curtain of snow that continued to fall and fall and fall.
“I’ve wanted to do that from the minute I first saw you,” Dylan said, answering the question Meg had forgotten she asked.
“You were too young to want something like that,” she blurted, her eyes sparkling.
“Nah,” he responded, grinning. “Romeo and Juliet were like, what? Ten?”
Meg laughed and kicked his leg with the toe of her muddy sneaker. Even if someone was looking out the window, they wouldn’t be able to see that contact. “You did not just compare us to Romeo and Juliet. That is so lame.”
“Girls like that kind of stuff,” Dylan shrugged, hiding a brief grin. He pulled his hands from the steering wheel so that he could study them in his lap.
“You know me better than that.”
He moved his chin a fraction of an inch and stabbed her with a look so naked and honest, she was convinced that he had just given her a glimpse past every fear, false vanity, and pretension. It took her breath away. “Yes,” he said. “I know you better than that.”
Meg blinked and turned to look out the windshield. “Why?” she asked again.
“Why what?”
“Why now? Why not back when I . . .” She almost said, “fell in love with you,” but she stopped herself before the words slipped out. Though she was heady from the clinging astonishment of his kiss, the last thing she wanted to do was admit that she was, in fact, in love with him and had been for years. But if he noticed her abrupt suppression, he didn’t let on. Meg fumbled to continue. “Why not before?” She didn’t finish the question, but her thumb felt absently for the ring that usually circled her finger. A little tremor of surprise flowed through her when she realized that it wasn’t there, and she had to remind herself that she had taken it off for football.
“Why not before Jess had his way with you?” Dylan asked, watching her with an unmistakable glint of bitterness in his gaze.
Meg glared at him. “It’s not like that,” she snapped, furious that he would dare to accuse her.
“Relax,” Dylan said. He braved a moment of contact, sliding his fingers across the bench seat so he could tangle them in her own. He held her hand for a moment, then squeezed hard and let go, wrapping his palms around the steering wheel again where it was safe. Or, at least, safer. “It’s all about timing, Meg. Always has been. Getting close to you is like trying to catch the wind. Either I tried to grab too early, or I closed my hand too late. You always seemed to slip right through.”
She considered his explanation for a moment, and though it seemed feeble, she accepted that a nugget of truth might reside in it. “But there’s more to it than that,” she said.
He nodded once and seemed to struggle with his thoughts for a few seconds. “It’s brutally honest,” he finally admitted.
“I’m a tough girl,” Meg assured him.
Dylan sighed and passed his hand over his face. “What do you expect, Meg?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where do you see us in five years? In ten?”
“College,” Meg said slowly. “Then . . . I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
“Do you see us together?”
The question hit Meg hard. Together? Somewhere, deep down, the answer was a real and living thing, a dream that she held in a place so secret she wondered where it had been hiding. Yes. She thought it almost instantly as hope blossomed in her chest. Together. Aren’t we perfect together? But Dylan’s eyes were unfolding a different story entirely.
“Come on, Megs. You think we’d make it? You with your perfect little life and white picket fence?”
“We don’t have a white picket fence,” Meg huffed.
“Whatever. Your life is still perfect. You have a bright future, a daddy and mommy who love you. A big brother who’ll probably discover the cure for cancer . . .”
“Bennett isn’t that smart.”
Dylan laughed, but it was a dry, humorless sound. “We’d never work. Not seriously anyway. We could . . .” he shrugged. “Do this. But I didn’t think that this was what you wanted.”
Meg wasn’t entirely sure what this was, but she was absolutely certain that Dylan was trying to let her down easy. That he didn’t feel for her the same way that she felt for him. Something inside her fragmented, broke into a million tiny pieces and shivered the detritus of her shattered wishes all the way down to her toes. But she couldn’t stand the thought of crying in front of him. Instead of breaking down, she got angry.
“So what exactly is this, Dylan?” Meg half shouted, thrusting her index finger back and forth in the space between them. “What are we? Have you been using me all this time?”
“Using you?” Now Dylan was mad, too. “How have I used you? How have I ever used you? I have done everything in my power to respect you—even when being honorable was the last thing on my mind.”
“How noble,” Meg muttered.
“We’re friends, plain and simple. Always have been. That’s all we could ever be—and you know it.”
Meg crossed her arms over her chest and glared out the slushy windshield. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“How many times have you come to my house?” Dylan asked, changing tactics so quickly Meg’s head spun.
“What?”
“Just answer the question.”
Meg didn�
��t have to think about it, but the answer was so surprising it took her a moment to spit it out. “Never,” she whispered, realizing for the very first time how strange that sounded. Why had she never been to his house? She knew where it was, of course, and she had stood on the doorstep many times, but she had never seen beyond the shag carpet of the wood-paneled entryway.
“Never,” Dylan repeated, as if that answered everything. He put both hands on the steering wheel, and out of the corner of her eye, Meg could see his knuckles slowly turn white. “Didn’t you ever stop to wonder why I never invited you in? Why I never really talked about my own life?”
“Dylan, I—”
“My dad was a meth head,” he interrupted. “Do you even know what that means?”
“Of course,” Meg managed to squeak out.
“I told you my parents were divorced, but I didn’t tell you why. Whenever you asked me about my family or my past or about living in Arizona, I told you Phoenix fairy tales and changed the subject.”
“That’s not my fault.” Meg was reeling, but she managed to feel a flicker of exasperation, too. She had never asked him to shield her from the nasty bits of his past, his life. If she had known, would it have changed anything? “You could have told me the truth.”
“The truth? How do you think an ugly story like that would go over in sweet little Perfect Town, USA? There’s a church on every corner and standards so high you all practically kill yourselves trying to reach them. Do you think your parents would let you hang out with me if they knew that my dad died of an overdose five years ago, and that they had to fish his body out of a gutter?”
Meg felt all the air in her chest leave in a rush. She was left panting on the front seat of the truck, wondering how she could love him and hardly know him at the same time.
