The Lovely and the Lost
Page 22
I wondered if Gabriel believed that. I wondered if he was headed back to his place to stare at the maps on the wall.
“Still think he’s too volatile for us to be around?” Free asked, conveniently forgetting that Cady had only cautioned me to stay away from Gabriel.
Cady brushed a stray strand of blond hair out of Free’s face. “I’ll make you a deal,” she told Free. “You agree to ask for makeup finals, and I’ll forget about the hitchhiking.”
“Or,” Free countered, “I agree not to hitchhike again, and you forget about finals.”
Free enjoyed having the last word enough that I wasn’t surprised when she tossed Cady a triumphant grin and sauntered off.
I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be alone with Cady yet. She knelt and laid her hand gently against the freshly turned dirt of Silver’s grave. I stood, staring down at Cady, down at the place I’d buried Silver.
“She was a mess of a puppy.” Cady closed her eyes, her fingers curling downward into the dirt. “Chewed everything, cried if you left her alone at night, spent the first two years of her life convinced she was a lapdog instead of a German shepherd.”
“She saved me.” My voice was every bit as hoarse as Cady’s. “You saved me.”
“Did you ever think,” Cady said, still looking down, “even once, Kira, that maybe you saved us? Me. Jude. Silver.”
My throat stung. “You should have told me the truth.” I struggled to find the words. My lips felt clumsy forming them. “Maybe not at first, but later, when I was older…” I swallowed. “I could have handled it. If you’d been the one who told me, I could have been strong.”
Cady turned to look at me, incredulous. “You’ve always been strong, Kira.” When I didn’t reply, she stood. “Do you think Saskia’s weak? Because of her scars, because of what she’s survived?”
“No.” I thought my girl was beautiful and wild and strong, and if I could have spent five minutes alone with the person who’d left marks on her, I would have showed him what weakness was.
“Yesterday, when Ness turned that gun on you…” Cady shook her head, her lips pressed into a thin white line. “I just kept thinking that it should have been me.” She paused, then repeated herself. “It should have been me, Kira, and not just then. When you were a kid, growing up in that house, fighting for your life in the forest, the years afterward when you had to fight so hard just to look people in the eye…it should have been me.” Cady’s voice shook. “There should be a way for a parent to do that for their child, to go through the things that no kid should have to go through, to feel every ounce of that pain so that you feel none.” She let out a ragged breath. “But there’s not. There are things that I can’t protect you from and things that I can’t undo, and it breaks me. It breaks me in ways that I hope you never understand, but I have never—not once, not even for a moment—wanted to protect you because I thought you couldn’t handle something. I just…” Cady lost her grip on her emotions then. I’d never seen her cry before, and I thought of Jude, deciding that he didn’t need to know about his father if asking hurt her so badly. “I thought you shouldn’t have to,” Cady said finally. “I thought that maybe once—just once—I could be strong for you.”
“Once?” I asked, the muscles in my chest constricting. “Cady, you’ve been there every day—”
“I’m your mom.” Cady reached out and laid a hand gently against my cheek. “It’s my job.”
I leaned into her touch and thought about Jude saying that she would have taken a bullet for either of us. I thought about how close we’d come to losing each other the day before.
“And speaking of a mother’s job,” Cady said, pulling it together and fixing me with a capital-L Look. “If you ever literally step into the line of fire again, I will—”
She cut off abruptly, and I realized we had company. Bales came to stand on my other side. “Don’t mind me,” he told Cady mildly. “By all means, try to find an effective way of threatening a fearless child.”
Cady snorted. She wasn’t fearless. Neither was I, but it was clear from her father’s tone that he saw himself as having been in her position more than once.
“I expect you’ll be leaving soon.” There was no judgment whatsoever in Bales Bennett’s tone.
“We will,” Cady said. “Mac is going to come back with us—at least for a little while.” She paused, and the silence stretched out like a canyon between them, until Cady muttered three little words. “You could, too.”
The edges of Bales’s mouth crept upward. Cady’s did the same. She didn’t wait for a verbal response, and her father didn’t offer one as she turned and walked back toward the house.
“You got something to add?” Bales asked me when he noticed me staring at him.
I stuffed my hands into my pockets. “Not a thing.”
He’d spent half a lifetime here, with Ness. Whatever the last months of his life held for her, it wasn’t going to be pretty. He could come home with us, but as I took in the overwhelming view of the mountain and breathed in the summer air, I wasn’t sure that he would.
“There’s an election coming up,” Bales said after a long moment. “For sheriff.”
I thought of Gabriel, of the way his stepfather had approached Bella’s case, of the thing’s he’d said to me.
“You have a candidate in mind?” I asked Bales.
“One of the FBI agents has family here. Seems to me he’s a bit burned out on the bureau.”
I felt the edges of my lips curve slightly upward. A gentle wind lifted my hair off my shoulders. For several minutes, Bales and I stood there in silence, and then he reached into his back pocket and pulled something out.
A photograph, folded and creased.
“I heard what you said to Ness yesterday—about Ash.” Bales unfolded the picture. He stared at it for a moment, then held it out to me. “Figured you were bluffing.”
I took the picture from him and recognized it as the one Ness had left for us the day before—Cady and Mac and Ash, in their early twenties.
“Funny thing,” Bales continued. “Ash did have a scar that ran from his jaw to his chin—but he didn’t get it until after the three of them started working hand in hand with the military.”
I didn’t follow what the implication of that statement was until I looked down at the photograph in my hand. Cady. Mac. Ash. Looking at it now, I could hear every confession that had crossed Cady’s lips the day before. I could see John Ashby reaching the extraction point and turning back.
What I couldn’t see was a scar in the photograph. No white line slashed across Ash’s jaw.
That’s not possible.
“How did you know?” Bales asked me. “About the scar?”
Suddenly, I was back in the forest, caught in a trap. Girl sees Man. Man helps her. Man always helps her—
In the span between one breath and the next, the memory was gone, and no matter how hard I fought to get it back, I saw nothing but the forest, the wolf, the dark-haired woman’s body on the kitchen floor.
I was bluffing, I thought, my head spinning. I was just trying to distract Ness. I made it up.
So why was it suddenly so hard to breathe?
“Maybe I will take Cady up on that offer,” Bales said, studying my expression. “I’d like to see more of this town of yours—more of your forest.”
Something wet and warm nudged my hand, and I jumped. I looked down to Saskia—loyal and wild and strong-willed and scarred. I’d never questioned how she’d come to us, who had dumped her on Cady’s property, why her previous owner had finally let her go.
As I sank down next to her, my fingers curling into her fur, her heart beating in tune with mine—I wondered. Wondered who had saved her. Wondered who had delivered her to Cady.
To me.
The writing, revising, and copyediting of this book spanned two and a half years, two pregnancies, two babies, and the most hectic period of my life to date, and I could not have done it without a wealth
of support from people to whom I am incredibly grateful. First and foremost, my editor, Kieran Viola, is incredible—all of the characters (but especially Kira, Gabriel, and Free) became so much more themselves with her guidance. I could not ask for a more supportive, thoughtful, hardworking editor, and I am so grateful for the way she worked with me to give me some time off when my babies were small. I am also incredibly thankful for my agent, Elizabeth Harding, and the rest of my team at Curtis Brown (especially Ginger Clark, Holly Frederick, and Sarah Perillo), who fight for my books and bring me so many smiles along the way. I am also blessed to have an amazing publishing team and would like to thank Emily Meehan, Mary Mudd, Marci Senders, Dina Sherman, and Cassie McGinty for all of their hard work on my behalf.
I am also so thankful for all of the support I have received (and continue to receive) from family and friends. I’ve been an author since I was nineteen, but the transition to being a writer and a mom is not one I could have made without such an incredible support system, full of people who are always there to help when I need them. I am particularly grateful to my husband, Anthony, who is the most incredible partner I could ask for; to my parents, who are never more than a call away; to our wonderful babysitters and daycare providers; to my colleagues and students at the University of Oklahoma; and to Rachel Vincent, who in addition to being my partner-in-crime for all things writing, was also one of the first people to come visit me after each of my babies was born.
Finally, thanks go out to all of the readers, librarians, teachers, and booksellers who have supported my books for more than a decade. The ongoing support for my Naturals series in particular was one of the things that inspired me to ask myself, “What would I get if I mixed The Naturals with Raised by Wolves and threw in three generations of family drama?” This book was the result.
has written more than a dozen acclaimed young adult novels, including Little White Lies and the Naturals series: The Naturals, Killer Instinct, All In, Bad Blood, and the e-novella Twelve. Jen is also a Fulbright Scholar with advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science. Jen received her PhD from Yale University in 2012 and is currently a professor of psychology and professional writing at the University of Oklahoma. You can find her online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com or follow her on Twitter @jenlynnbarnes.