by Noelle Adams
Her head knew it. Her heart should know it too.
She wanted all of herself to know the truth, so deeply she could feel it in her throat.
She moved her hand to the panel and pushed it hard. It fell with a clatter to the floor.
Cade was standing a few feet away, and he’d been facing away from her. But he whirled around at the sound.
“Oh fuck, baby,” he gasped, striding over to her and kneeling down. “Oh fuck.” His face was contorted with emotion, more than she’d ever seen it before.
He reached to pull her out of the hiding place.
He pulled her into a tight embrace, and they hugged on the floor, shaking and emotional, for a long time before she finally drew away.
She’d shown him her hiding place, which meant there was nothing left now.
Nothing but the ghost.
It was time to show him that too—like she’d wanted to do earlier before she’d gotten so scared.
She was going to do it all right away, before the old fears rose up and surrounded her again.
She leaned forward to give Cade a little kiss on the jaw. Then she took a shaky breath and stood up. “I’m ready now.”
“Holly, you don’t have to do anything—”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. It’s time. It’s time for it all to come out.” She started to walk outside, feeling weak and sore but determined. She had to do this right now if she was ever going to do it.
Cade followed right behind her, reaching out to take her arm. “Holly, it’s starting to get dark. Maybe we should wait—”
“I don’t want to wait. You want to know the truth, don’t you?”
He nodded wordlessly. He looked wary and tense and bewildered and so worried. About her.
“I’ll take you to it.”
“Holly,” Cade said. “Are you sure? You don’t want to wait until morning?”
Cade had a point. The sun was setting. It would be dark in the woods.
But it was always dark in the middle of the woods.
“It has to be now,” she said, her eyes holding Cade’s, willing him to understand. “Please.”
He nodded and straightened his shoulders.
She’d lived her life assuming she would never tell anyone, but now it felt like the only thing left to do.
Maybe this was the new thing, the good thing, the incredibly hard thing she’d been wanting to do.
Maybe this was the necessary thing—no matter what else it was.
Maybe it was the only way her head and heart could finally come together.
Whatever the case, she was going to do it.
Cade’s amber eyes were urgent, but he didn’t say anything else, and he fell into step beside Holly as she started to walk toward the woods.
The middle of the woods. The thickest part. Dark and shadowed and filled with undergrowth, hiding the truth from the world.
Where the ghost—the memory—dwelt.
She hadn’t gone into this part of the woods for three years, not since she’d run out of cash and needed to make her way back to the rest of the money.
It was where her mother had buried the money she’d stolen from Mason all those years ago.
The money wasn’t the only thing buried there.
Cade was completely silent as they walked, as if he might have felt a force moving him here too, into the dark of the woods, as the sun was starting to set over the bay in a splendor of pinks and purples.
After a few minutes of walking, the colors of the sky were no longer visible. It was dark. Very dark. The trees were close together, and they couldn’t walk very quickly because of the roots and shrubs that had grown up in the untended woods.
Cade pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight function to give them a little light.
The fox lived in here somewhere. She had no idea where.
The deer made their way through these woods regularly on their way to get the apples, and many of the birds nested in here—where it was safe, where no humans entered.
Except the two of them. Right now. Pushing their way to the spot she knew by heart.
A large willow with a fork near the base and the rotting remains of a tree that had fallen beside it.
They were almost there now.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Cade asked softly, his words finally breaking through the long silence
She wasn’t looking at him, but she could feel his strong presence beside her and she could sense his eyes on her face. “Yes.”
“We could get lost in here.”
“We won’t get lost.”
“How far is it?”
“Not far now.”
Cade paused and reached a hand out to gently touch her arm. “Are you okay? Are you okay doing this?”
She shook her head, moving her arm away from his touch. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be close to him. Just that he made her feel weak.
And she couldn’t be weak. Not to do this.
This might be the only chance she had, before the darkness, the pain, the guilt, the ghosts, swallowed her up again.
“I’m not okay. Not until I do this.”
Cade didn’t question her anymore, and he stayed completely silent for the rest of the way except for his heavy breathing.
And Holly was pale and trembling and almost choking on a pressure in her throat as they finally reached the dark place, the most secret place.
The forked tree next to the dead tree, where her world had unraveled one night six years ago.
Maybe it was only here that her head and her heart could finally know the truth together.
Sixteen
Cade had never been as on edge in his life.
He knew it was adrenaline—the buzzing in his head, the acuteness of his senses, the way his body started to lunge at every sound—but it made the night feel like it was a scene from one of his books, the picture reel in his head he saw as he wrote out scenes, fleshed out descriptions, narrated acts that occurred on the darkest fringes of humanness.
That was how it felt to him right now. Like he was writing it rather than living it. But Holly’s tense form beside him, the sound of her ragged breath, the feel of her cold presence beside him were as real as they could be.
He knew she was taking them to a dead body, buried somewhere in these woods more than a decade ago. It was the body either of her mother or of Mason. He didn’t know which one, but he knew it was the final piece of the puzzle he’d been putting together in his mind.
But he wasn’t relieved or curious or excited about finding it all out at last.
He felt tired and sick and terrified.
He didn’t know what revealing this secret would do to Holly.
He stepped over brambles and pushed branches out of his way. He was panting—from intensity of emotion rather than exertion—when Holly finally stopped. There was nothing but more trees in front of them.
“Through here,” she said hoarsely.
Cade pulled back a large branch that was blocking their path to reveal a small clearing—not even a clearing, nothing but a spot shaded by the thick canopy of trees above, where nothing could grow beneath.
On the far side of the clearing was a strangely shaped tree with a low fork—as if two trees had been grafted together like Siamese twins. Beside it were the remains of a tree that had fallen, mostly rotted now, nothing left but wood so fragile it would crumble if touched.
“This is it?” Cade asked, moving past the blocking branch to stand beside them. He was sweating profusely, although it wasn’t a hot night. It was pitch-black this deep in the woods except for the flashlight on his phone.
“There,” Holly said, nodding toward the ground.
It looked like nothing more than a rotted pile of leaves. “What is it?” Cade asked, breathless but still cautious. He couldn’t push. Holly was already so on edge she looked like she’d fall apart any moment.
She took a few steps over to the forked tree and reached
up to what was evidently a hole in the trunk, masked by leaves and branches. She pulled out a bundle of bills, protected in clear plastic.
Cade frowned and came over too, reaching up into the hole to pull out another bundle of bills.
He wondered how much cash was down there.
“This is what she stole from Mason?”
“Yes. She was always afraid he’d come back for it. That was why she came here that night.”
“What night?”
“The night she left.”
He knew then that the body under those leaves was her mother.
Cade unintentionally lowered the hand holding his phone as he processed this, and the light lowered with it, casting their faces into darkness. He raised it again, the eerie, artificial light as cold and unnatural as the night.
“What happened to her?” he asked very softly.
Holly panted for a moment, her eyes resting on Cade’s face. The night felt like it grew even darker as Cade’s blood suddenly chilled in his veins.
Then she went on without wavering. “She told me I’d never be free while she was around. She told me that the idea of him would never stop haunting her. I think, that night, she was actually thinking lucidly instead of convinced Mason was always the shadow around the next corner. But she didn’t think I could ever be happy and free while she was around, so she left me.”
Cade could barely breathe over the pain in his throat. “She killed herself.”
Holly nodded and finally said the words out loud. “She killed herself. She cut her wrists. I found her up here. Blood was… everywhere.”
“And you never told anyone?”
“I couldn’t. It would mean telling other people everything, and we never did that. I was eighteen, and I was scared. I tried to dig a hole, but it was dark and I was… devastated. I mostly just covered her with leaves.”
He thought about the little animal graveyard she’d created and suddenly realized why it was so important to her to give even the animals proper burials.
His heart broke for eighteen-year-old Holly, as much as it did for Holly right now.
“We can just leave her here if you want,” he said, feeling a sliver of guilt at the suggestion but unwilling to hurt Holly any more than she’d already been hurt.
“No. I knew telling you would mean everything changed. We can’t leave her here anymore.”
“Holly,” Cade began with a different kind of sliver of fear. “Holly, if they dig up this body from here, there are going to be a lot of questions. Even with explaining it was suicide, it will be a death that was never reported. They’re going to investigate. There will be a lot of people all over your land, and it won’t all go away overnight.”
She met his eyes. “I know that.”
“You’ll have to tell the police what you just told me.”
“I know that too. I knew it from the beginning.”
“Are you sure you can do it?” He wanted to take her in his arms, to take her away to a beach somewhere where nothing could touch her again.
He knew it wasn’t possible.
Holly said, “What choice do I have? I want to… to finally be free, and I don’t think I ever will until the truth comes out.”
Cade understood, and he loved her even more than he had before, that she was strong enough to make this choice.
She’d taken him here, knowing the outcome, knowing it meant her sanctuary would be leveled, as surely as if they’d brought bulldozers with them.
He wondered why she’d done it. Then he realized he already knew the answer.
She’d been living on the cusp all her life, in between, never taking action. She’d been living in the shadows, never taking a step out into the light. She’d been holding the fishing rod but never casting it.
And now she finally had.
Four hours later, Cade was pacing in the sheriff’s office, restless and anxious and praying Holly was all right.
She wasn’t used to being around people. The past two weeks had brought her out a little, but being with Cade alone was different than being in an interview room with four people she didn’t know.
Cade had called a guy he knew who was a criminal attorney in Norfolk, and Pete had driven up to represent Holly, arriving an hour ago. Since then, Cade had been waiting. And waiting.
And hoping this wasn’t too much for her.
“Cade,” came a familiar female voice from the doorway of the sitting room where he was waiting.
He whirled around to see his mother.
“Mom!” He stopped pacing and stared at her. “What are you doing here?”
“Roy told me,” she said, frowning as she came over to where he stood. “George, who’s at the front desk, called him to tell him you were here. So Roy called me. Why didn’t you call to tell me what was going on?”
Cade rubbed his face with both hands for just a minute. Every muscle in his body ached, and he was close to tearing the door off the interview room so he could get to Holly. “It’s midnight.”
“You know I always wake up at four anyway. What’s a few hours’ difference?” She took his arm and bustled him over to a chair, and somehow he found himself sitting down in it. “Your girl is in trouble?”
Cade nodded. “She didn’t do anything wrong—not really—but she’s in trouble.”
“Well,” his mother said with a long sigh. “We’ll take care of her. Won’t we?”
It was two more hours before Holly and her lawyer finally came out of the interview room. She was shaking visibly, but she looked basically composed.
With a helpless sound in his throat, Cade strode over to pull her into his arms.
She clung to him, and that meant something—he could feel she still trusted him, no matter what he’d held back from her before.
“Are you all right?” he murmured, his mouth very close to her ear.
“Yeah. I want to go home.” She felt fragile, breakable, in his arms.
“You can’t go home yet,” he said. “They’ve got your house and the woods all blocked off—to look for evidence and all that in the morning.”
Holly’s face twisted, but she nodded in acknowledgment.
“It will take a while to sort through everything,” Pete, the lawyer, said, looking composed and competent, “but it seems like a pretty clear case of suicide. Since she was so young at the time and all alone, I don’t think there will be any charges pressed in the end. The money was stolen though, so she won’t be able to keep that.”
Cade was pretty sure Holly didn’t give a shit about the money.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Cade’s mother said, coming over to stand beside them. She’d stayed with him the whole time as he was waiting. “You need to get something to eat and go right to bed.”
Holly was dazed, like she couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on.
It wasn’t surprising. She’d lived on her own for six years—barely talking to anyone. Being surrounded like this would be traumatic, especially on top of what she’d had to drag back up from the dead tonight.
Cade was surprised she hadn’t simply passed out from the trauma of it.
“I can’t go home,” she said at last.
“We can go to the beach house I rented,” Cade said, searching for some option that would make her feel better. “At least it’s close to your home.”
“Cade, dear, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t take her back there, not with all the ruckus from the investigation going on next door. Not to mention there’s no air-conditioning or decent bathroom in that place.” Cade’s mother’s face was deeply sympathetic as she told Holly, “You can come home with us. I can fix you up the guest room.”
Holly looked blankly from Cade to his mother.
“Is that okay?” Cade asked gently. “I know you don’t know her, but at least it will be quiet there. You don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to.”
Swallowing so hard it was visible, Holly nodded. “Okay.” She turned to look at his mo
ther. “Thank you for having me.”
His mother looked surprised. “Well, of course. Cade said that you were his girl, and we always take care of family. I’m going home now, and I’ll start fixing some eggs and bacon and cinnamon pancakes. That will fix you right up.”
Cade thanked her and said they’d be there shortly. After they talked a little more with Pete and cleared things with the sheriff’s office, Cade walked with Holly out to his SUV, keeping an arm around her.
When they closed the doors and started the car, Holly turned to him with a little smile.
He was so relieved to see an expression that looked normal and natural that he grinned like a dope in response.
“So I’m your girl?” she asked, raising her eyebrows slightly.
Cade cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, Mom assumed that. She can tell how I feel about you. I totally understand if you’re still angry about before, if you don’t want to jump right back into—”
Holly laughed and reached out to put a hand on his face. “Of course I’m your girl, Cade. Just as long as you’re my boy too.”
Cade felt his heart relaxing for the first time in twenty-four hours. He reached up and took her hand from his face, bringing it around to press a soft kiss on her palm.
For a few seconds he felt the beautiful, exquisite tension at the cusp, that moment of anticipation, before the thing finally happened.
Then he made it happen—because that was who he was.
He murmured, “Always.”
Seventeen
Holly was trying hard not to fall apart completely as she walked into a mint-green Victorian house on one of the main streets in Cape Charles.
She’d passed this house quite a few times over the years as she rode her way through town on her bike. She’d noticed it because of the color and because of the wide, welcoming front porch.
It was strange and fitting that it belonged to Cade’s mother.
Holly had always told herself—sometimes repeatedly—that her choice to live alone on the one piece of land she knew and loved in the world was a conscious one, a decision she made and kept making because she was happiest that way. She’d always reminded herself that she wasn’t suffering from some kind of phobia or mental illness.
