by Maisey Yates
Dinner for two, though. Definitely not for all the people that lived in this house.
Her heart thundering, she went outside, and she saw Josh. Dressed in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, which she had a feeling was dressed up for him.
She spent a lot of time around men in suits. Very nice suits. Well tailored suits.
Nothing beat Josh Anderson in dark jeans and a T-shirt, when it was especially for her.
“I made dinner,” he said.
“Did you also tie my family up and stash them in the basement?”
“No. They took a generous gift card and went out to dinner.”
She looked around. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said.
She was stunned for a moment. Absolutely stunned. Because they had been sleeping together, certainly. And the way things were between them, it wasn’t like she could pretend it was casual. No, the need between them was far too sharp for that.
She also couldn’t stop being with him, so she was willing to deal with the emotional ups and downs she felt every time they shared a bed.
But this was like dating.
No, this was like something she hadn’t experienced in... Ever.
Because she just didn’t. Men didn’t do things like this for her.
You never stay with them long enough to give them the chance.
“Thank you,” she said, cautiously. “But I’m not sure I understand.”
“I wanted to do something nice for you,” he said. “There’s no catch.”
“There’s always a catch, Josh, or have you not heard the one about the free lunch?”
“This is a free dinner. And since I’m the person that made it I think I’m the one that gets to decide whether or not it’s free, don’t you?”
She tilted her head and looked at him from the corner of her eye. “I don’t even have to put out?”
“No,” he said. “Anyway. You put out for nothing, Hannah, so, I don’t know why you would think I made you lasagna to get you have sex with me.”
“I think mostly because I’m not sure what you want.”
He looked at her, and something in her melted. Outright melted. And she felt... Like she was in more danger than she had ever been in before.
“I just want your time. That’s it. Do you think you can give me that? For a little bit?”
She nodded, mute. He pulled the chair out, and she sat down at the table, where there was lasagna and salad.
“Did you really cook this?”
“Yes. Basic survival skill.”
“One I don’t even have.”
“What do you do?”
“There are many apps that allow you to push buttons and have food magically appear at your front door.”
“Not here.”
“Yeah. One of the many reasons that I find this place to be a hellscape.” But she looked up, at the string of lights, and the rosy gold sky, at the green trees and the tips of the mountains that she could see beyond the yard. At the man across from her. And she had a very hard time applying the word hellscape to any of that.
“I think it’s pretty beautiful.” His eyes were on her, and her heart squeezed. “I did think about leaving,” he said. “You know, for a while there. But then Dad died, and that left ranchland to run. And I love that, Hannah, I found out I really loved the ranch. It doesn’t pay the bills on its own, and that’s one reason I started this business. It’s better, to not have to worry about your land sustaining you. Better to have something else to help out, because one thing I can guarantee you is that pipes will start leaking, but I can’t guarantee you that we’re going to get a good crop of hay. I can’t control the weather. And then Jamie got married and started having kids, and I get to be an uncle. That makes me happy. My family makes me pretty happy.”
It made her ache to see him like this. This man, who had a capacity to care about the land of his family in this deep way. Who made his roots here seem steady and solid and right, instead of limited and small like she’d seen them all those years ago.
It was her life that felt small suddenly. An apartment and a violin. Yes, she had friends. And yes, she cared about them. She had fun. But it didn’t resonate, not right now. And for some reason this did. For some reason he did.
She had always thought that if she ever came back and had a confrontation with him she would be fancy and superior and he would feel like a damn fool. Wish that he had followed her, or something.
Even though you made that impossible.
“I’ve dated other women, Hannah. But I don’t think anything’s ever come close to us.”
She tried to choke down the lasagna, but it suddenly tasted like sawdust. Because he still thought she was someone she wasn’t. And that was the problem with that little fantasy she just had. That he might someday wish he could have her back, or wish that he’d gone with her.
She’d done her best to kill that. To end it. She really had. She’d been mean, but she hadn’t told the truth.
And that secret was so deep, so buried inside of her that even thinking it made her head hurt.
She thought of Lark and Ben and how much she wanted Lark to be able to find her happiness with him. How she’d pushed her the other night to have her own reunion fling and...
And she just wanted to run away from hers now.
Because this wasn’t a fling.
And it wasn’t casual.
She’d known it wasn’t. She’d known it when she couldn’t sleep with him that first night and she was still here.
It had still come down to this.
“Dance with me,” he said, taking his napkin from his lap and putting it on the table.
“No,” she said. “That’s silly.”
He took his phone out of his pocket and opened up the music app, put on a song about a woman looking perfect tonight, and held his hand out.
And she sat there frozen, staring at that hand, her mind flashing hard between the past and the present.
And when she looked up at his face, it wasn’t his face that she saw.
You want to get into that school, don’t you, Hannah? If this is about that boyfriend of yours, I thought you were different. I thought you were driven. That’s why I feel the way I do about you. Because you’re like me.
You’re special.
Her skin crawled, and she stood up, moving away from him.
“No, Josh, this is a mistake. I’m going back to Boston. I’m not starting something with you.”
“Hannah, I can’t explain what I feel for you. After all this time. I’m actually pretty pissed off about it. That I wasn’t angry when I saw you, I just wanted another chance to see what we could be.”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. Because you love it here. And I... I hate it.” But those words felt like a lie. “I thought that I would’ve made you hate me effectively enough nineteen years ago.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t,” he said. “God knows why.”
“Well if you knew the real reason I broke up with you, you probably would.”
“And what’s that?” he asked, his face stone.
“I slept with someone else, Josh. I slept with someone else, and when I broke up with you I couldn’t bear to tell you that. But it’s true. You shouldn’t want me. Because that’s who I am. You loved me, and I betrayed that. You can’t trust me. At the end of the day, if you know one thing, you should know that. You can’t trust me.”
25
She has arranged for the baby to go to her cousin. She will send for her later and claim she is the child of her niece, widowed by the war and unable to care for her. She says this is right, for she has a piece of him, and our daughter will endure no shame. I don’t know what it means for me.
Dot’s diary, February 1945
Lark
Lark stumb
led into Ben’s garage, still feeling high off of the shouting session she’d had with her sisters. It had clarified things. She’d worked the whole day and done what needed doing at the Craft Café, but she’d been buzzing with energy, anxious to see Ben again.
She’d learned something in that attic. That sometimes outbursts made you closer to someone, not more distant.
Ben looked up when she came in and her heart stopped. But her words wouldn’t be.
“I have a whole lot of speeches for you. Saved up. Rehearsed. Some of them are angry, and some of them are tearful, and some of them are about how I have a lot of regrets. And some of them are about how I don’t have any. I’ve gone back and forth a lot over the years. But now that I’m here, I don’t actually want to give any of them. I just...”
She crossed the distance between them, and it felt like walking across years. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck, and she kissed him. And he kissed her. He dragged her into the garage, shutting the door behind them, and turning the lock. It was fierce, and hard. A storm that had been brewing for sixteen years.
“Ben,” she whispered.
There was nothing to say now. Nothing at all.
“I want you,” he said, his words filled with gravel. She pushed her hands beneath his shirt, grateful that he had already drawn the blinds on the windows. His skin was hot, his muscles more densely packed than they’d been when they were younger. And those tattoos. She peeled his shirt up over his head, her heart stuttering as she looked at his body.
“I want you,” she said. And then they were kissing, and he peeled her shirt up over her head, casting it onto the washed-out gray and white floor.
He walked her back, behind the counter, and through a door that led to a tiny room with a very small bed inside.
“A holdover from the end of my marriage. Things were not going well.”
“Oh.”
“Convenient.”
It was all a little bit much. It tangled the past and the present, and she didn’t know what the hell it said about the future. But that all melted away as easily and quickly as their clothes did. His touch was like magic, perfect in every way. The first time they’d been together, she’d been young. She had no experience at all. And more than that, she hadn’t known what it would be like to live in a world where she knew what it was to be with him, and not have him. She knew now.
She’d lived in it for years.
And she wanted to take the risk. Knowing what she did, she wanted to take that risk. And somehow that made everything more intense. More powerful. His lips, his tongue, his hands. All of it traced dark magic over her skin, made her feel like she was burning.
Made her feel alive.
As if that wild thing that had roamed around inside her chest all of her life, when she was a young girl, that thing that made her spontaneous and willful and irrepressible, was now crackling over every inch of her body. Only he could ever do that. Take that feeling and make it focused. Take it and make it matter.
Take it and make her...
Feel more like her than she ever had before.
Not before. Not after. Both things.
Together.
And when he surged inside of her, she gasped. Because it was good. And it was perfect. He was Ben.
And she was Lark.
And maybe in the end, they were the ones that were inevitable.
Maybe they had been meant to be all along.
It didn’t matter that the bed was small, it didn’t matter that it was a glorified cot. It was perfect for them. Because the moment was right. Perfect in every way. As tangled and messy and difficult as it was. It was still perfect.
And when it was over, he held her, tracing shapes over her hip, and she looked at the ink on his forearms.
“What do they mean?”
“I got them after the divorce.”
A smile curved her lips. “I wondered about that. I didn’t think that Keira would be into tattoos.”
“Not especially.”
“I like them.”
There was a pause. “Somehow, I figured you would.”
“Really? Like... In the last couple weeks?”
“No. When I got them.” He shifted, and that was when she saw it. The bird resting in the mountains on his upper biceps.
“Ben...”
“It’s a lark.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I don’t... Why?”
“Because you’re part of me, Lark. You always have been. And I wondered, for a long time, if it was just me... Romanticizing something that I couldn’t have. You know, married men like to do that, I think. Pretend that there’s some great, unobtainable love out there that’s keeping you from fully being present in your marriage, or whatever. I don’t know. I just always thought about you. Even after I wasn’t with her anymore.”
“What about the other ones?”
He turned his arm over, and there was a rose, embedded in a thorny vine. “Taylor’s middle name is Rose. The thorns are pretty self-explanatory. The mountains are Oregon. The bear is Bear Creek.”
“Nothing for Keira?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Are you that mad at her?”
He shook his head. “No. Not for myself. But the part of her that I carry, is Taylor. That’s the piece I don’t regret. The piece I know means something. And beyond that...”
She touched the bird on his shoulder. Where she wasn’t sharing space with Keira. At all.
“Is this really something that we get to try?”
“Yes. I think we need to. I really do.”
“Me too.”
“You know I was in love with you, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, the words sounding heavy. “I think I was in love with you too. I just didn’t know what love meant yet.”
“What about now?”
“I know what it means now.”
So did she. And for the first time in a while, she felt a very real bubble of hope blooming inside of her chest. Maybe she had come back not to put the past away, but to find a way to redeem it.
26
Today, we crossed into Oregon. Today, I feel new. I started off to Oregon to find a new life, but I did not expect to find so much more. Of all the things, it is hope that surprises me most. For it was always there, or I would never have started on this journey. If not for hope, I would never have made it this far.
Anabeth Snow’s diary, 1864
Avery
All the kids were sitting outside eating ice cream and in general creating a scene. They’d gone into Medford to meet the kids’ school friends and to give Hannah privacy for her date with Josh. Avery had always liked him, and she hoped—she really hoped—that her sister made it work with him this time.
The teenage boys were being crazy, and the teenage girls were pretending to be above it while staring and giggling.
Avery watched the scene from her car, smiling slightly. She remembered this. When watching a boy that you liked felt dangerous and fun in a totally different way than that thing between men and women had turned into for her.
When the world was full of possibilities, and you played games with your friends to try and predict the future. Folded notes that offered glimpses into what could be. But nowhere and never had she predicted that she would find love, find the man of her dreams, only to have him turn into some kind of monster. Only to have it become something deadly and dangerous and quite the opposite of a dream.
She didn’t know what you did after that.
And she missed being sixteen right then.
When you were so convinced that becoming an adult was a destination, and you wouldn’t just be continuing on the journey. Having no idea what you were doing or what you wanted, or where to go.
It was like being sixteen in some ways, actually, ex
cept knowing all the things she didn’t know. She felt like she had just gotten her first job. And she felt confused and like the popular girls hated her. So yeah, maybe it wasn’t being sixteen she missed. Maybe it was just feeling like there was a future ahead where she would know everything. When she was convinced now that didn’t exist.
Her phone buzzed and when she looked at the screen and saw the name on it, everything in her went cold.
David.
She looked up, and that was when she saw him standing there in the parking lot.
She felt an icy sliver of fear, because she kept remembering what Hannah had said about how things escalated. About how she might actually be in danger.
And she wanted to scream. Because this was the father of her children and she was afraid of him. And right then, she hated him as much as she had ever loved him.
She got out of her car, because they were in public, and she was going to make sure that if he did anything, or thought about doing anything, there were going to be a hell of a lot of witnesses.
She crossed her arms and stood as tall as she could. “What are you doing here?”
“I tracked your phone,” he said. “We need to talk.”
She hadn’t even thought of that. Her phone. They were on the same account because everything was meshed together. So deep and in too many ways to count.
“We don’t need to talk,” she said. “All of the talking between the two of us is going to be done between law enforcement and lawyers.”
“Lawyers, Avery? Really? You had me arrested. I was at work.”
“You hit me,” she said. “In my kitchen.”
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t pause. It was like she hadn’t said anything.
“You didn’t even talk to me about it.”
“Is there anything to say? Is there anything to say at all? How can I talk to you. How can I talk to you when it’s going to just end up with me being injured. I can’t do anything to stop you, and you know that.”
“I’m not that guy, Avery, don’t make me sound like I’m some psychopath.”
She was thankful the car door was between them. “I’m sorry, what guy aren’t you?”