Hungry didn’t begin to describe the state of his stomach.
“You’ll be safer driving if you’ve eaten something,” she went on, which sounded like a dubious theory to him. “Plus—” She spun around again, and this time produced a bag of ground Colombian coffee. “When we’re done with the soup, we can brew some of this for you to take on the road. To keep you awake.”
He shrugged and acquiesced. He told himself it had nothing to do with the fact that the last thing he wanted to do was leave her. The bottom line, he told himself, was that she was making good sense: it was dangerous driving on dark mountain roads when you were both exhausted and famished. He let himself slide past the obvious fact that coffee could be brewed now rather than later, and that the sooner he hit the road, the more awake he would be for the drive.
She foraged successfully for saucepans and a box of crackers. They dove into the crackers while she put the soup to heat atop the stove.
“Why don’t you microwave it?” he asked.
She stirred the pots with wooden spoons. “I think food doesn’t taste as good when it’s nuked. And that it doesn’t stay hot as long, either.” Dubious Theory Number Two. “It’s also rebellion,” she added, which surprised him. She met his eyes. “My ex nuked everything. It was pretty much that he was always in a rush, going through medical training and all. But after we broke up I went through this phase where I did everything the opposite of the way he would have done it.”
Reid crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the Formica counter. “But that’s all over now.”
She smiled to acknowledge the point. “I like to tell myself it is.” Abruptly she turned away, strolled to the other end of the mini kitchen. She spoke again without turning to face him. “I can’t even imagine what Philip would think about this whole murder suspect thing. It must make him doubly glad he unloaded me.”
Her voice was small, and her head bent. Reid watched her. He was a good friend of heartache and quick to recognize its hallmarks. “I think it’s much more likely that he feels for you and wishes he could help somehow.”
“No.” She raised her head to regard him. “That’s nice of you to say but I really don’t think so. Philip …” She stopped and bit her lip. “He was never a big one for helping anybody but himself. He must’ve always been that way but it took me a long time to see it.”
“If that’s true, then you’re better off without him.”
She smiled, a weak effort. “When I’m thinking clearly, I know I am better off.”
Reid wanted to punch this Philip character, whom he’d never met and never wanted to meet. Clearly the self-absorbed jerk had done a number on Annie, then got himself gone when the urge took him. Leaving her to suffer. Still.
Reid refused to move, refused to obey the desire to bundle her into his arms, whisper that not all men were terminal assholes, reassure her that better days lay ahead. But those words implied promises he couldn’t make. The silence between them grew like a mushroom cloud.
Annie broke the impasse. “Why don’t you set the table?” she suggested, and he hopped to it, grateful to have something to do. He began investigating cabinets and drawers, trying to find everything they needed. But even that mundane task took them back to sensitive territory.
“I thought you’d have a better idea where everything is.” She didn’t look up, kept cracking pepper into the twin saucepans. “I figured you’d been here lots of times before when you found the place so easily in the dark. But it looks like maybe you haven’t spent so much time here.”
It was pretty obvious what she was driving at. Reid said nothing as he folded paper napkins in half and set soup spoons on top of them. Apparently he wasn’t the only one that night being attacked by the green-eyed monster, though it was ironic that Annie would focus on Sheila, a woman he had tried to love but couldn’t, rather than on the one woman he had such trouble getting out of his heart.
He made his voice light. “Go ahead. Ask me.”
She said nothing for a moment, then set down the peppermill with a clatter. “Okay. Were you ever involved with Sheila?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t work out.”
“That’s it? That doesn’t tell me much.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
She rolled her eyes, then shut off the stovetop burners and began to ladle the soup into bowls. “Well, it tells me something that Sheila still thinks so highly of you that she let you use this cabin to hide me. In fact,” Annie paused. “It tells me a great deal.”
There was a fresh undercurrent to her words now, one of sadness and something like longing.
“Surely,” Reid said, “even if your husband was a lowlife, you’ve been involved with men who were—” He stopped, wanting to say worthy of you. He rephrased. “—who treated you right.”
“Actually, no.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. She carried their soup bowls to the table, balancing them carefully. “I didn’t date in high school and met Philip in college. So he was the only one.” She put down the bowls and let loose a forced laugh. “The good news for any new guy is that Philip set the standard pretty low. It’s not hard to beat.”
“You should make it hard to beat.”
She jerked her head up as if startled by the sharpness in his tone.
He cleared his throat. “What I mean is …” He stopped. He felt her gaze on his face as he took his seat at the table. Watchful. Hopeful. “What I mean is, you deserve happiness, Annie. And a man who can help you find it.”
He wondered in the next moments how time stopped. Normally time cranked along, refusing even to slow down, but every once in a while it paused, telescoped, as if to key you in that this, this, was a moment to take note of.
He knew he wouldn’t soon forget the sight of Annie across the round pine dining table. The brightness of her green eyes, with those black lashes that went on forever. That crazy dyed blond hair, which was both unnatural and oddly sexy. And the extreme stillness in her bearing when she listened to him. She was intense when she focused and now her laser concentration was pinpointed on him. It was both flattering and unnerving.
“Did Donna make you happy?” Her voice was soft. “I bet she did.”
Of course by now Annie had forgotten Sheila. Reid had known she was too smart to aim for long at the wrong target. He let out a breath. “She did. She made me very happy.”
“What happened?”
He knew, of course, what Annie was referring to. Unfortunately, there was one defining night when it came to Donna, one tragic storyline that superseded all others.
“We witnessed a robbery,” he heard himself say, “at a convenience store.”
Annie was silent. Outside the cabin walls rose a pristine hillside, forested and removed from civilization. But Reid felt himself cast back to the gritty heart of a city, an LA parking lot, and an ill-advised late-night run to pick up a pint of ice cream.
“We were on our way home from a movie and stopped off at an all-night store. I’d just gotten out of the truck to go inside when I saw a hold-up through the glass door.” He could still reconstruct every detail in his mind’s eye. The overbright fluorescent lights, which made the shop a beacon in the midnight streets. The counters stuffed with merchandise. The young male clerk behind the register, raising his hands in the classic Don’t Shoot Me pose. “Bigelow was waving a gun at the cashier’s face, yelling at him to hand all the money over. The guy looked terrified.”
“What did you do?”
“I got my revolver out of the truck’s glove box. I was about to go inside the store when Bigelow came running out.” Reid remembered how their eyes had met. That split second when they had registered one another as men, as opponents. “Then he got in his car and raced away.”
“Had he shot the clerk?”
“No.”
“Where was Donna through all this?”
“In the passenger seat of my truck.”
&
nbsp; “What did you do?”
Not what I should have done. Not what I would do now if I had a second chance. “What did I do?” he repeated. “I gave chase.”
“But …” Annie looked puzzled. “You weren’t on duty, right? You had Donna with you.”
He looked away. No. No, he hadn’t been on duty.
“But you gave chase anyway,” she murmured.
And there lay the crux of it. He hadn’t been on duty. He could have walked away and no one would have blamed him. He could have called in the crime, described both Bigelow and his vehicle, comforted the petrified store clerk, then bought his ice cream, taken Donna home, and enjoyed the rest of his evening. That’s what he could have done and that would have been the end of it. After all, no one had been injured and store robberies were a dime a dozen. It wasn’t worth an off-duty officer breaking a sweat.
But Reid Gardner hadn’t been just any officer. He’d been a cocky 29-year-old sonovabitch who’d never suffered anything worse than a broken nose and who let no crime go unsolved. Who didn’t yet understand how the world worked. Who didn’t yet understand that a man could spend a lifetime paying for one lapse in judgment.
“We tore through the streets,” he said, “Donna and me in the truck behind Bigelow’s car. Eventually he fishtailed into a lamppost and had to abandon his vehicle.”
“And then you chased him on foot,” Annie said.
“I told Donna, ‘Stay in the truck. Don’t get out of the truck.’” To this day he remembered the exact wording of his instructions. He remembered her sitting in the passenger seat listening to him, dressed in jeans and a white tee shirt, her face pale, her blue eyes nervous, her hand trembling as she pushed her straight blond hair back from her forehead. She’d looked so pure and true and trusting. She was a schoolteacher, for Christ’s sake, who daily walked the halls of hope and innocence, who wanted nothing more than him, the children they would raise together, the life they would share. They were to be married in less than five weeks.
“Then I ran after Bigelow.” He remembered the clack of his heels on the pavement, the thumping of his heart, the cold weight of his service revolver in his hand. He didn’t know, even now, if it had been adrenaline that propelled him or testosterone run amok. He’d handled the situation like a TV cop, chasing an armed suspect on his own, without backup. Yet this had been a real-life crime, not a Hollywood chase scene. Meaning there was no second take. “It didn’t take long for Bigelow to make a mistake and run into an alley. I realized later there was a tall fence at the rear of it but he must have felt he didn’t have enough of a lead over me to scramble up and over.”
“So he felt trapped.”
And he reacted like a trapped animal will. By attacking.
Reid shut his eyes. The scene spooled out in his memory. Reid, unable to see Bigelow in the pitch-black bowel of the alley. Going on the highest alert, immediately throwing his body back against the shadowy wall, knowing he’d be backlit otherwise, a perfect target. Suddenly a shot from Bigelow, ricocheting uselessly off the pavement, booming like a sonic blast through the near-empty neighborhood. Bigelow, invisible, shouting from the black depths. Who the fuck are you? Leave me the fuck alone if you know what’s good for you!
“He fired a shot,” Reid said, “that didn’t hit anything. But Donna must have heard it from the truck. She must have thought I was down.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Reid saw Annie raise her hands to her face.
His lips continued to move as if of their own volition. “She showed up at the mouth of the alley, calling my name.” Reid! Reid! He could still hear her voice, quavering, frightened. “She just stood there, staring down the alley and calling. It was as if she was frozen. I don’t know if she couldn’t see me or what. I screamed at her to get back, go back to the truck, but she didn’t move, I don’t know if she couldn’t move—”
He stopped. Annie’s hand grasped his own. Her skin was warm but he felt cold, so cold, frozen himself.
“And then Bigelow fired again. And this time—”
This time he hit her. It was as if he had taken dead aim. He hit her square in the chest. She collapsed backward onto the sidewalk, her blond hair splayed like a halo, her blue eyes wide and surprised, her life’s blood blooming like a red rose over her heart. His name was the last word she ever spoke. She had died fast, so fast. A lifetime snuffed out like a bubble on a pond. Sometimes Reid tried to convince himself she perished so quickly that she hadn’t suffered. Other times, when he was driven by a morbid desire to wallow in pain, he told himself that she had felt a torment not even he could imagine.
“Bigelow got away.” His own voice sounded small, and distant. “He climbed over the fence. I didn’t even try to stop him.”
“He didn’t matter anymore.”
“No.” He paused, then, “Nothing did.”
*
Annie pushed away her bowl of soup, untouched. She wondered why she could have wanted to know how Donna died. It was unfathomably horrible. And that Reid had to go on after that, wake up every morning, live his life …
She couldn’t speak. She could do nothing more than hold his hand. The touch of him was proof that he was there, physically there, but he might have been a galaxy away, adrift in a horror beyond comprehension. That seemed never to end.
He turned toward her. His blue eyes were dead at that moment, as were the words he spoke. “I can’t forgive myself. I put her in the situation that killed her.”
“You tried to protect her.”
“I should never have let her get close to that kind of evil.”
Words he’d spoken to her earlier that night repeated themselves in her memory. All I’m saying is that I cannot protect you if you insist on doing what I tell you not to do. That’s what Donna had done, though Annie was sure she had felt she had no choice. Yet now Annie understood why Reid got so angry when she took unnecessary risks. No wonder he always imagined the worst possible outcome: he’d seen it happen.
“Reid, you shouldn’t blame yourself like this. You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have known.”
“Life doesn’t work that way. We can’t know in advance what will happen. Nor can we make people do the things we ask them to.”
He turned away. “I have played the If Only game so many times. If only we hadn’t stopped to buy ice cream. If only we’d gone to a different store. If only we’d been two minutes later.” He stopped. What he didn’t say hung in the air. If only Donna had stayed in the truck.
“She was trying to protect you, you know. She was afraid you’d been shot.”
“And it killed her.”
“Did you ever stop to think that it might have been you who’d died otherwise? Bigelow might have hit you. Or he might have shot you, too, so you wouldn’t be a witness to Donna’s shooting. It might have ended differently but even more tragically.”
He said nothing. Annie had the idea he believed it would have been only his due to die that night. After all, Reid would reason, he was the one who made the mistake, so he should be the one to pay for it.
Annie couldn’t find it within herself to agree. She felt a pang deep in her soul imagining a world without Reid Gardner in it. It shocked her how desolate that landscape appeared. And yet only weeks before she had never met the man, never seen his face.
She leaned closer. “The point is, you did the best you could at the time. That’s all any of us can do.”
He pulled his hand away and vigorously shook his head. “No way that was my best.” His voice was harsh. “I was an arrogant sonovabitch. I thought I was invincible. And Donna paid for it.”
“Can you never forgive yourself?”
“Why should I?” He raised his eyes to hers. “Donna lost her life. I’ve still got everything. My health, my family. Christ, I’m famous now, and rich. I’m a goddamn celebrity.” His voice had risen. “Why the hell should I forgive myself? How do I do her justice by letting myself off the hook?”
&nb
sp; “You’re not doing her justice this way. She loved you. She would want you to be happy. She wouldn’t want you to suffer for the rest of your life because of one mistake, even if it was so costly. Would she? I don’t think so.”
“I don’t get why you’re going so easy on me.”
Oh, I do. Annie looked at Reid’s ravaged face and completely understood. Understood what Donna must have felt. Understood what it was to love this man. Understood what it was to want him to be happy.
She knew she had no right to trade his life for Donna’s. Yet she was grateful to the bottom of her soul that he had been the one to walk out of that alley alive, that he had been the one given the chance to go on.
Yes, she realized, taking in every detail of Reid across the small pine table, it was too late for her now. Too late to hold back; too late to think it through. She’d done it again, what she’d done in college with Philip, jumped headlong into the chasm, plunged blindly into something she didn’t know the depths of.
He spoke again. “I haven’t talked about this in a long time. Most people don’t want to hear about it anymore. Even my family. They’ve run out of patience. I’m supposed to have gotten over it already. Moved on.”
“They probably think you’ve punished yourself enough. They don’t want you to lose another day of your life reliving a past you’ll never be able to change.”
Even as she mouthed the words, she understood how self-serving they were. She wanted him to move on as well, not only for his sake but for hers. She wanted him to put the pain of his past in a box he opened only rarely, and to live his life in the full light of the sun. With her beside him.
Something inside her made her push him again. “Don’t you want to live again, Reid?” She kept her voice soft and her eyes on those rough features of his, that stern mouth and crooked nose and set jaw. It was the face of an intense man, a controlled man. She wanted him to lose that control, shake if off like a too heavy sweater. She watched him take in her words. She held her breath, and wondered if he grasped what she was really asking. What she was really offering.
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