by Nicole Baart
Be with him, he thought. Lucas whispered it over and over again until the words bloomed of their own accord and the final hour of their vigil before the authorities burst in grew into a prayer of the sort he hadn’t spoken in years. It was a balm to his soul, a comfort that made Angela’s fury and Dylan’s sorrow seem bearable somehow. Like small, black remnants of fabric that only made the mosaic more beautiful. Hadn’t he learned that long ago? That the light shines brighter because of the darkness around it? Though it seemed impossible, Lucas felt hope in the wings. For himself. For Jenna. Even for Dylan. There was a certain expectation, a hint of lingering promise that he was just beginning to remember.
When Alex finally arrived, Lucas was ready for him.
After giving their statements and being interviewed for longer than Lucas felt necessary, Alex begrudgingly gave Lucas and Angela permission to go home. It sounded like heaven to Lucas, like some faraway fairy-tale land, and his heart nearly burst at the thought of leaving the sorrow of Dylan’s story behind. But it wasn’t something you simply walked away from.
In the moment before they left him, Lucas caught Dylan’s eye and tried to smile. It didn’t work, not completely, but something passed between them all the same. An understanding, if nothing else.
“What are you doing here?” Lucas asked Dylan, though he had already admitted that he had followed the newscast of Jim’s suicide and the unidentified body in the barn back to Meg’s hometown. DCI established that his next stop would have been Blackhawk and the last place he had seen her alive. He just hadn’t made it that far.
“I came here to find her,” he whispered.
But Lucas knew that was only half of it. Dylan had also come to let her go.
27
LUCAS
Angela didn’t have much to say on the way home. She sat curled against her door, arms wrapped tight around her abdomen and head tilted toward the window as if she couldn’t get far enough away from Lucas. As if she longed to peel away the glass and hurl herself into the night as it careened by.
Lucas attempted conversation more than once, but there was nothing he could say. Her father’s absolution had been swapped so quickly for a guilt Angela had never anticipated. Who could blame her for not being able to absorb it? He knew that any anger she clung to was the result of a lifetime of disappointments, accumulated like dust in an abandoned corner of her heart. Deep down, she had hoped to hear that her story was nothing but a misunderstanding: that the man who stole her youth and plagued her adulthood was not who she always believed he was. Didn’t she deserve a fairy tale?
And yet, there was something redeeming in Jim’s final years, in the way he cared for his daughter long-distance even though he couldn’t bring himself to do it when she still lived beneath his roof. His watchfulness was a small thing, but it bespoke a depth that Lucas hadn’t known Jim possessed. It held a quiet tenderness. It hinted at regret and hope and recompense for sins that could never be repaid. But at least he had tried.
Somehow, it made Lucas believe in the power of small things, the intangible kindnesses that communicated love in a language people rarely stopped to hear.
“It’s okay,” Lucas wanted to tell her. “He loved you in his own way.” But he knew that she didn’t want to hear it. Not right now. He prayed that someday, when there was enough distance between the life Angela had inherited and the hopes she’d attached to it—those impossible dreams that she couldn’t have stopped if she tried—she’d look back and know that her father had done what he was capable of. It didn’t make up for anything, but maybe amid the ruins of her past there remained a door, even a window, that opened on forgiveness.
By the time they drove up to the Hudsons’ house on the edge of a sleeping Blackhawk, Angela had petrified: she was as hard and implacable as the furious woman who had stood in his kitchen nearly two weeks before and swore she would clear her father’s name. After watching her soften, risking stability to believe in something with no guarantees and allowing herself to hope, it killed Lucas to see her so undone.
“I know that this isn’t what you wanted,” Lucas said, chancing her wrath in an effort to coax her to talk a little. He thought it would be good for her to let at least some of it out. “But your dad tried to make amends. In his own way, I think he was asking for forgiveness.”
“He was a small man,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “Spineless and pathetic and weak. He made himself strong by preying on the frailty of others. I should have known. I don’t know what I was expecting.”
A miracle, Lucas thought. You wanted to rewrite your story, swapping the evil father for a broken and misunderstood man you could love in retrospect. In spite of his earlier feelings for Jim Sparks, Lucas could admit that the man who hung himself in his barn was exactly those things: a collection of loss and failure that would never overcome the sum of all its shattered parts. Lucas just hoped that his daughter wouldn’t spend her life paying for the sins of her father.
“Go home,” Lucas told Angela gently. “Go back to the life you had and leave this all behind.”
“I intend to.”
“Just leave your bitterness here.”
“So now you’re a counselor?” Angela scoffed. “Advise me, O wise one. How exactly should I deal with all of this?”
“Look, I’m not trying to condescend. I just—”
“What? You just what?”
“I want good for you.”
Angela didn’t say anything in response, and Lucas sat staring out of the windshield at his shadowed home. “She died that day,” he said after a moment. “Meg did. But your life began. Don’t forget that.” As he watched, the first few flakes of the year began a spinning descent to the earth below. He had to squint to make them out, but within minutes, the air was sparkling, resplendent in waves of soft-strewn white like a gift of tossed confetti. It seemed victorious somehow, a halfhearted celebration in honor of all they had learned.
The woman beside him had gotten what she wanted, but it came at a cost. So had Dylan. So had Meg. They had all paid for wanting what they didn’t have and for going to any length to get it. Was it narcissistic to take what hadn’t been given? Was it unpardonably selfish to expect things that had never been promised? How could people account for their carelessness? Their hasty decisions and wild impulses born out of thinly veiled self-interest?
Suddenly, with the snow falling and his house framed in a glowing globe of early winter peace, everything was thrust into sharp perspective for Lucas. The air outside was cold and draped with points of snow like accumulating evidence of all the things he had overlooked. Dylan and Meg and Angela weren’t the only ones who had paid dearly for wanting what they didn’t have, who had forfeited the happiness they could have known for the sake of hollow dreams they couldn’t. So had he. This wasn’t about Jim Sparks or a crumpled, forgotten body in a wasted barn. It wasn’t even about uncovering the truth.
“It’s snowing,” Angela said.
“I know,” Lucas choked out. He was so anxious to flee the car, he felt stifled, claustrophobic. Desperate to find Jenna.
If Angela noticed his impatience, she didn’t seem to notice. She said slowly, as if she was trying to measure his response, “I’m leaving.”
“Okay.”
“Right now.”
Lucas didn’t try to talk her out of it, though he guessed she wanted him to. He didn’t try to stop her. The decision was hers to make and for once in his life he was going to forget about doing the right thing and focus on doing what he needed to do. For himself. For Jenna.
Angela’s bag was packed in ten minutes, her things hastily thrown in with no regard for the mess she would have to deal with when she got back to California. It was as if she couldn’t get away from Blackhawk fast enough, and though Lucas didn’t blame her—in fact, he couldn’t wait for her to go—he held on to the hope that it wouldn’t always be this way. That they would meet again, under different circumstances, and the good of what they had shared wo
uld outweigh the bad. He wanted to wake Jenna and share the moment with her, to point out the possibility with the same anticipation that made his heart rise at the sight of snow.
But Angela didn’t want to say good-bye to Jenna.
“Just give her a hug for me,” the young woman said, huddling in the chill of the entryway.
“You don’t want me to wake her?”
“It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. You never wake someone at such an ungodly hour unless it’s important.”
“Saying good-bye isn’t important?” Lucas questioned, half hoping she’d change her mind and half wishing that she wouldn’t.
Angela forced a smile, and already there was the faintest trace of humor there. Of warmth. She wouldn’t be cold forever. “Jenna’s important to me,” she said. “But don’t wake her. Tell her I love her. Tell her I’ll call her soon.”
“We’ll see each other again,” Lucas finished for her. She didn’t argue.
For some unexplored reason, Lucas felt brave, and he strode purposefully toward Angela and pulled her into his arms. It was a brotherly hug, laced with the shelter of a father and the solidarity of a friend. He could be a bit of all three to Angela, and although they had endured their share of relational confusion, he determined that tonight was a fresh start. A chance to step back to the place they should have always been.
“Take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will,” she whispered against his chest.
He watched her get into her car and pull away, wondering where she would drive. Back to Sioux Falls to catch an early-morning flight? To Omaha and the place where Meg had stepped into a truck instead of onto a plane? Or maybe she would follow the path that Dylan and Meg had hoped to take: through the Black Hills and Yellowstone and the canyons of Nevada. A honeymoon of sorts turned into a requiem. Whichever way she decided to wander, he hoped it would take her where she needed to go.
Lucas’s own journey consisted of climbing a few stairs, but the distance seemed much greater.
The door to the attic was closed, and in all the time that Jenna had been sleeping there, Lucas had respected her privacy and never once opened it. Now, with his palm cold on the handle, he felt a thrill of anticipation. He was storming the tower for her, breaking all their unspoken rules to lay his soul before her. And there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t walk away.
Jenna was curled up in the double bed, tucked in a fetal position that took up exactly half of the mattress. Lucas instinctively knew that the other half was for him, but it seemed that there was no welcome in the space she saved, only habit born of routine and preserved through practice. But for once he didn’t feel sorry for himself. He simply crossed the expanse of hardwood floor between them and slipped out of his clothes, tracing with his gaze the outline of his wife as she lay beneath the sheet in the soft glow of light from the window.
Crawling in beside her, breaking all the unwritten rules of their so-called separation, Lucas slid across the bed until he was cocooned around her. He buried his face in her hair and draped his hand across her narrow abdomen. For some reason he could never understand, she hated to have him touch her bare stomach, but this morning he didn’t care. He curled his fingers beneath the curve of her waist and pulled her tight against him, enveloping her as if he longed to take her in, to make her a part of himself.
Jenna was awake and he knew it.
“Did you do it?” she asked into the darkness, abandoning any attempt at subterfuge.
Lucas kissed the back of her head through a tangle of dark hair. She didn’t flinch or pull away. “Do what?”
“Have an affair with Angela?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“Did you want me to?”
Jenna made a noise of disgust and tried to pry his hand from her waist. But Lucas refused to let go. He wove his legs through hers and held on for all he was worth.
“I did not have an affair with Angela,” he told her, his mouth close to her ear. “I did not want to have an affair with Angela. But I think you wanted me to.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I think you wanted me to do something terrible so that you would have an excuse to finally leave.”
Jenna breathed slowly in and out, in and out.
He considered her silence an invitation to continue. “We grew apart every day, a little more and a little more, until suddenly we woke up one morning, strangers in bed . . . I don’t know you anymore.”
“I don’t know you,” she echoed.
“Why?”
Lucas meant the question to be rhetorical; he didn’t expect her to answer. It hung in the space between them, covering the long history of all they had been through and obscuring it beneath a blanket of regret. Did it matter why?
But apparently it mattered to Jenna. “We lost our baby,” she told him, replying to his muttered inquiry with a sob that told him just how close her pain still was. How real.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, holding her tighter, willing her to cry. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Don’t you miss her at all?”
“Of course I do.”
“Doesn’t it kill you?”
“Yes.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she sputtered. “You have no idea what I’ve been through, how much it hurts. It feels like I was the only one in this marriage to lose a baby.” Jenna tried to wriggle out of his grasp, but he refused to loosen his hold on her. After struggling for a few moments, yanking desperately at the iron of his hands, she gave up and gave in to gut-wrenching sobs, the likes of which he hadn’t heard for years. It was as if everything she had bottled up since they put Audrey’s tiny casket in the ground was all at once bubbling to the surface. He rocked her as she wept.
“I haven’t been there for you,” he murmured against her neck. “I didn’t give you what you needed. I wanted you to get over it, to move on, to start again. I wanted to fix you.”
“You want to fix everything.” She sniffed, wiping the back of her hand against her eyes, her nose.
“You used to like that about me.”
“Until you started trying to fix me.”
“I just wanted things to go back to the way they had been.”
“Everything changes, Lucas. Audrey changed me. Angela changed me. I can’t be the person I was when you married me.”
“I know.”
“No,” she told him. “I don’t think you get that at all.”
They lay there in silence for a few moments, Jenna’s quiet whimpers creating an undertone of loss in their dark room and Lucas’s heart keeping pace with the furious racing of his battered mind. He knew what he wanted, but he didn’t know how to get there from here.
“What did happen? Where were you last night?” Jenna finally asked, still wiping tears, though her voice had a characteristic edge.
“I stole a ring,” he confessed, starting at the beginning.
“Excuse me?”
“Remember the body? The woman in the floor of the barn?”
“Of course.”
“I found her ring in the barn. And I took it.”
Jenna gave a little gasp and wiggled around to face him. This time, he let her go. “You did what? That’s a crime, Lucas. A felony . . . I don’t know. But you stole, you tampered . . .”
“I know.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but I think I took it because I wanted to make it right. I was failing us, but this seemed like something I could do. I could take what was broken and make it new.”
“I can’t believe you did that.”
“I know.” And then, with his wife facing him in the dim light of a newly snowy world, he began to tell her everything.
Jenna listened willingly enough, and Lucas thrilled to the intimacy of sharing his story with her. At some point he reached out to touch the line of her slender arm with his fingers, and when she didn’t pull away, he felt a ru
sh of affection fill his chest. Maybe there was hope for them after all.
Lucas’s story faded as the world began to slowly fill with morning light. The snow was still falling, Lucas could tell by the accumulation that continued to deepen on the outside window ledge. He loved the sight of all that white, the sky turning dove-gray with clouds that seemed a comfort. And his heart leaped and stumbled as his wife regarded him across their rumpled bed.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she admitted finally, holding his gaze.
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I have to say something. One of us does. You crawled into my bed after months of avoiding it. And now you’ve just told me that your life for the past few weeks has been a lie.”
“I’m sorry.”
But she didn’t seem angry. “You’ve already said that.”
“I know.”
Jenna stared at him hard, and he tried to fill his eyes with every hope and longing that he had secreted away in the years that came between them. He wanted her. He always had. All he needed was to hear her say it, too.
“What do you want?” he asked, his heart thick and suffocating at the back of his throat.
She sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. But I don’t think your little story is enough to make everything okay. This isn’t a fairy tale, Lucas. I’m no princess.”
He didn’t know what made him do it, but he leaned over and kissed each of her eyelids in turn. Then her forehead, her nose, her cheeks. Her mouth. Just once. A sweet, soft kiss. “Yes, you are,” he said.
Jenna smiled a little, a thin, sad smile that accused Lucas of being naive. Foolish. He didn’t care.
“I love you,” he told her.
She didn’t say it back, but she didn’t leave either. Lucas knew that it was a start. Nothing more. It didn’t erase all they had been through or negate the hard work that they would have to do to get back to the place they had been. But it was something. It was real. And in that moment, with light on their shoulders in a blessing of a new day, it was everything he wanted.
