by Serena Bell
“Do you want to hear what I learned? I Googled him, too, under the other name,” Lily said. Jeannie had told them Kincaid’s parents’ last name, his legal name.
Sierra touched Lily’s hair. “You know I do. Do you need a glass of wine?”
“Do you have anything stronger?”
Sierra winced. “That bad, huh?”
When they were settled with their wine and a bag of dark chocolate squares, Lily told her sister what she’d learned. To fill in between the little bits of the story Kincaid had told her, she’d read newspaper accounts of the crime and the trial—how public sentiment had turned sharply against Kincaid, how his lawyers had said that there was little possibility for him to have a fair trial in a town that saw Arnie Sinclair as a good cop and a hero.
How at the last minute, Kincaid’s grandmother had declined to speak at her grandson’s sentencing hearing, on his behalf.
Jeannie had told them, Lotta people said that was proof of Kincaid’s guilt, if even his own grandmother wouldn’t say anything good about him at his sentencing. But I know Grant never believed that. I didn’t, either. I don’t know why she missed it, but I know she must’ve had a good reason.
Lily kept thinking about what that must have been like for Kincaid. Facing a long sentence in maximum security prison, knowing that your grandmother could intervene…
And then wondering why she had chosen not to speak on your behalf. What it meant.
She wished, she wished so hard, that she had been able to do what he had asked her to do. Trust him. Believe him. But she hadn’t, and her body wouldn’t lie for her.
Sierra sighed. “It makes everything make more sense, huh?”
“Does it?”
“Well, it makes more sense why he said flat out that he wasn’t relationship material. Prison, violent crime—not exactly the kind of guy women line up to get pregnant by.”
It was true, but it wasn’t all there was to Kincaid, either. You don’t know him, she almost said, but the truth was, neither did she.
She thought of what Kincaid had said, about how his grandmother had been the only person in his world. And she wondered. She’d said it hadn’t been his job to do what he’d done, to chase after justice, but if no one else was doing the job, was that still true? And if it had been Lily in that situation—if the victim of abuse had been Sierra or her mother, if one of the kids had been hurt over and over again—what would she have done?
She liked to think she wouldn’t have held a knife to someone’s throat, but she’d been lucky enough not to find out what she would do in a situation like that. Kincaid—Kincaid hadn’t.
“At any rate,” Sierra said, “he’s not relationship material for you. You can’t tie your life to a guy like that. Not now, not when you’re so young, and you have so much ahead of you. I mean, what kind of chance does that guy have to make anything of himself?”
Which was exactly what Kincaid himself had said.
“And right now, he can’t even travel. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t visit you in Chicago unless his parole officer gave him the go-ahead, and presumably he doesn’t have any money for flying—and how’s that going to change, when getting anything other than a minimum-wage job is going to be practically impossible for him, maybe for the rest of his life? You don’t want that for yourself.”
Lily didn’t. Of course she didn’t. And yet she’d almost told Kincaid she didn’t care what he’d done. Didn’t care what his prospects were or whether he could give her what she deserved or whatever nonsense he’d been spouting.
But of course that was a naive perspective. That was the lust talking, the bubble of kinky sex they’d existed in for weeks. Kincaid and Sierra were dead right: Lily had a whole life ahead of her, and Kincaid was a bit of summer madness. And really, her craving for rough sex, that weird dark side of her, had always been and would always be nothing but trouble for her. In that, Fallon had been right.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Sierra said, “but I think you do.”
The tears came rushing up, then, and she leaned into her sister and cried—for herself, yes, for having been so close to exactly what she wanted, and then so far away, but most of all, for a man who had made an impossible decision.
—
Even though there was no reason to think that Arnie Sinclair, or anyone else, would recognize the car he’d been driving since being sprung, Kincaid parked far from his grandmother’s house, tucking his beater into a pull-off intended for hikers and mountain bikers. The conservation land bordered Nan’s property on one side and Grant and Jeannie’s on the other. Kincaid was headed for a spur trail, less than a mile in, which he’d cut himself nearly twenty years ago with Grant’s help so he could come and go as he pleased, in and out of the public forest. The trail led to his grandmother’s house.
The forest here was old growth, dinosaur trees reaching their points high into the sky, but the path was wide and laid with pine needles, soft underfoot, comforting. Sun dappled the forest floor in only a few places, spots of brightness. The smell of evergreen seared his nostrils.
Lily would like this, he thought, as he did a hundred times a day. She’d been gone only three days, but it could have been a year, she felt so far away, so remote, and so permanently removed. He’d called her, once, but she hadn’t answered, and he hadn’t left a message. What would he say if she did? I want you back. But he couldn’t ask that of her. She belonged where she was.
It was just as well, because what he was about to do could very well land him back in prison. He’d come to search the house for the missing will. Lily was gone, and he had nothing to lose. So the least he could do was take one last stab at getting the will—and justice for Nan.
He was already in Yeowing in violation of his parole. In a few minutes, he’d make things worse by trespassing on land that didn’t belong to him, and by breaking and entering. He believed the house was empty, but if it turned out it wasn’t, or if Arnie came home in the middle of his search, he’d also be violating the order that he stay far away from his step-grandfather.
The damp smell of moss and humid soil rose around him as he made his way through the trees, until the short spur to the road joined a main loop trail. He was hoping not to run into other hikers; he’d worn a cap, pulled low, and sunglasses, but he knew he was physically imposing enough to catch people’s attention, and recognizable if he caught the attention of someone who knew him well.
He was almost to the junction when he heard a mountain bike, coming fast down the trail. He looked around frantically for a place to hide, but the trail rose steeply to one side and dropped off precipitously on the other, and he’d end up scrambling dangerously just to barely conceal himself behind a tree. Instead, he stepped to the side of the trail and prayed it wouldn’t be anyone he knew.
The bike skidded to a stop past him, and a voice said, “Caid?”
It was Grant. Of course. One guy in the forest, and it had to be him.
“Aren’t you too old for that shit?” Kincaid demanded.
“Never,” said Grant. “Day I’m too old for fishing and mountain biking is the day I’m dead.” He dismounted his bike and leaned it against a tree. “Hey, man. I heard what happened. That Jeannie blabbed. I’m so sorry. I never thought to tell her to be discreet. I figured she knew better, and it didn’t occur to me that she and Lily would cross paths.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I’m an asshole for not telling her sooner. She was gonna find out somehow.”
“I called Jeannie.” That had been a huge sacrifice on Grant’s part. He’d cross ten streets to avoid talking to his ex-wife. “I chewed her out, attorney-client privilege, but she said what she told Lily wasn’t anything secret I’d told her, only what everyone knew. And she said she tried to tell Lily you didn’t do anything wrong. You just did what any of us would have done if we’d had the balls.”
“I don’t think it’s what Lily would have done,” Kincaid observed mildly.
“She
would have, if it’d been her grandmother,” Grant said. “God damn, I never liked that guy. Never trusted him. I told Nancy that, but she didn’t listen to me.”
“She didn’t listen to anyone,” Kincaid said bitterly.
“Did you talk to Lily, after? Before she left?”
“We talked.”
“And?”
Kincaid turned away for a moment.
“Shit,” Grant said. “I’m so sorry.”
“She went back to Chicago. She got offered a job.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Grant’s sympathy and regret cracked through Kincaid’s numb acceptance and into the raw pool of emotion underneath.
Lily.
A cry, a howl, in his heart.
“It’s not your fault, and it’s not Jeannie’s fault,” he told Grant. “It’s my fault. I stabbed a man. I went to prison. I didn’t tell her the truth.”
“Your grandmother’s land is right over there, isn’t it?” Grant asked.
Kincaid nodded.
Grant tipped his head to one side. “Rumor has it your parole says you can’t be in Yeowing or near Arnie Sinclair.”
Kincaid smiled wryly. “Rumor also has it that my grandmother left everything she had, money and property, to Safe Haven.”
Grant sighed. “Man, she loved those kids.”
Kincaid could only nod. He’d just remembered one Christmas when he and Nan had stayed up all night on December twenty-third, stuffing stockings for the kids. He’d been young enough to still believe in Santa, so it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d also be up late the next night, making Christmas magical for him. But that had been one of the most splendid Christmases he could remember. He’d woken up on Christmas Day to a brand-new bike. She must have stayed up all night on Christmas Eve assembling it.
He could imagine Lily doing that sort of thing. He could imagine her up late, putting together a kid’s bicycle; up early, cooking for her family, gathering everyone around her and listening as they told her their worries or their hopes.
Not him, though. Not him, not his kids, not his life.
“You need to get out of here.” Grant was dead serious. His eyes were beginning to be rheumy with age, hands starting to claw, but his body was still lean and tough, the legacy of an active life.
Kincaid hesitated.
“You don’t want to go back to prison,” Grant said. “You should get yourself home.”
“I have to find that will.”
“Nancy wouldn’t have wanted you to go back to prison.”
“She would have wanted her kids to have that money.”
Grant shook his head. “Not at your expense, Caid. No way. I knew her. She wouldn’t want this.”
“I gotta, Grant. I gotta do this for her.”
Something was breaking down inside Kincaid, some wall, as impenetrable as those concrete walls he’d lived behind. As fast as he piled up reinforcements, he couldn’t keep up with the dissolution.
“Caid,” Grant said gently. “You don’t gotta.”
“After what I did, after what I did to her—”
Grant took a step toward Kincaid, but didn’t touch him. Just stood there, a little closer than normal personal space, until Kincaid felt a little calmer, because there was a person in the world who would do that. Stand by him. “You didn’t do anything to her,” Grant said. “You saved her from that asshole, that’s what you did.”
“I didn’t save her,” Kincaid said. “I left her. I left her alone with him, in that house, and—it killed her.”
“No,” said Grant. “No. That’s not what happened. You gave her the conviction to leave. That counts for a lot.”
Kincaid stared at him blankly. “To leave?”
Grant gave him an astonished look in return. “You don’t know.”
“I don’t know what?”
“That she left him. Oh, Jesus, I always assumed she told you.”
“She left him?”
“Two weeks before she died. She was living at Safe Haven, and she was in the middle of taking a restraining order out against him, and she had all kinds of plans for how she was going to start visiting you—I ran into her, and she looked great, and she sounded great.”
Kincaid couldn’t believe it—he couldn’t take it in. It was too much, didn’t make sense yet. Emotion surged and bucked in him, wild and confusing, everything he’d ever wanted and yet wrapped up in so much suffering.
She had left. She had walked out, walked away.
It was like tossing ballast out of a balloon, the sensation. He was light enough to float over the world and see it clearly for the first time in years. Or maybe in forever.
She had gotten out.
“You’re—you’re sure,” he managed, finally.
“Of course I’m sure, Kincaid. I just—I didn’t realize she never got a chance to pay you a visit before—” Grant coughed and blinked. “I would have told you, if I realized she never got a chance to.”
“Fuck,” said Kincaid. “Fuck.” And he pounded his fist into his thigh because that was the last way he knew to hold it together, by making some pain somewhere else that was fiercer than the sudden, brilliant realization that she’d gotten free, in the end. That he’d somehow, somehow, made a way out for her.
Free. She’d gotten free.
For the first time in more than seven years, despite the rules that still bound him, despite the constraints and the limits, he felt free.
“Go home, Caid,” Grant said. “Get away from here before someone else sees you. Go home and keep your ass out of prison. One last thing you can do for her.”
Chapter 18
“So now we just need a photo, and you’re ready to go.” Kristin leaned in close to the laptop screen and began reading through the dating profile she’d created for Lily.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”
“C’mon, it’ll be good for you. You can’t mope about him forever.”
“I wasn’t moping. And it hasn’t been forever.” It had, in fact, been six weeks—six weeks since she’d left Tierney Bay and moved in “temporarily” with Kristin and Tucker.
Kristin gave her a jaded look.
“Maybe I was moping a little.”
The truth was, moping took too much emotional energy, and Lily was numb. At work, everything was as it should be, and yet she waded mechanically through prep and mise-en-place. She cooked and finished and plated, garnished and passed plates across to where the servers grabbed them and delivered them to diners. But as she did it, she felt no particular sense of satisfaction, no particular joy. It was as if she’d been unplugged in some fundamental way from the process, as if she were watching herself from a safe, sterile distance.
Tucker’s dad, having gotten an earful from Tucker about Lily’s abilities, had given her a lot of freedom in the kitchen—to experiment, to remake or replace recipes that weren’t working, to improvise when ingredients ran out or didn’t look good at the market. But even that felt mechanical.
She didn’t dislike her job. She didn’t like it or dislike it; she didn’t feel anything about it, just as she didn’t feel anything about the apartment she shared with Kristin and Tucker. It was a good apartment, with walls and a ceiling and floors, a place to keep her belongings and to lie on a bed when it was sleeping time. She had her own room. There was a shower and there were towels, and in the kitchen there was food that she cooked with as little active pleasure as she cooked the food at Weekdays.
She had told herself that it would feel better with time, that she would get less numb and start having emotions again, that she would enjoy the card games that Kristin and Tucker made her play, that she would have fun conversing with the friends they invited over.
She told herself that she would feel less angry and less hurt, that her mind would stop reaching for Kincaid at unexpected moments—when she constructed a hamburger, when she trussed a chicken, when she saw city workers pruning trees. When she lay
in bed, when she showered, when she got into a car, when she walked past a diner, when she read a book, when she watched that television show that Kristin and Tucker were so enamored of, with the female prisoners.
But six weeks had passed, and if the anger or the hurt or the craving had abated, she hadn’t detected the improvement.
She was pretty sure she knew why. A few days ago, she’d followed a table’s order out of the kitchen and watched a waitress set it down in front of a family. She’d watched them eat. And she’d waited for the sensation of being plugged back in, that gust of thick pleasure that came from watching people eat food she’d prepared.
Nothing.
They chewed, they smiled, they even swapped bites across the table, and she watched and waited.
Still nothing.
Wrong people, she’d thought. I’m not feeding the people I want to feed.
She wanted to feed Sierra and Reg, her nieces and nephew. She wanted to feed the redheaded family and the older couple.
She wanted to feed the town of Tierney Bay.
She wanted to feed Kincaid.
She wanted it worse than she’d ever wanted anything before.
“Lil?”
Kristin was waiting for her to wake up from her reverie. “Photo,” she said patiently, but she rested a hand on Lily’s arm and gave her a sympathetic smile. “Do you have any photos of you on your computer?”
“And preferably not any like these half-assed ones my brother has posted on Facebook,” said Tucker. He was sitting on one of the overstuffed chairs in the apartment’s living room, half-listening to their profile-building, and chiming in with jibes and mockery when it was called for. Some part of Lily’s mind could find it amusing, but that part floated above the rest of her, as if no emotion, not even humor, could penetrate to where she waited, below.
“What’d he do this time?”
“Posted pics of him being drunk and stoned and half nude—he should know better.”
“Maybe he was too drunk and stoned to know better,” Kristin suggested.
“I’ve told him a million times, nothing ever goes away in the electronic realm,” Tucker groused.
