Mary
What on earth am I doing? I shake my muddled head as I watch the Inn Lady climb back up the dunes, her green thermos snug beneath her arm, and wonder if I’ve lost what little is left of my mind. Letting people in is a bad idea. A dangerous idea.
They sidle up next to you, all syrup and smiles, ask all the right questions, say all the right words. And then while you aren’t looking, they open you up and take you apart, poke at your wheels and your gears, until they realize they have no stomach for what they’ve found—and then they leave you.
And each time they do, you scrape up the pieces and find a way to put yourself back together. Only somewhere along the way, a few gears go missing, and then a few more, until one day the little that’s left comes flying apart, and all your warped wheels and broken springs are laid bare to the world. And perhaps you deserve that kind of scrutiny. Perhaps it’s even good for you. They tell you it is.
But I can’t do that again. I won’t.
And yet here I am, risking exposure—and worse. How would pretty little Lane Kramer react if she knew where I’d spent the better part of my years—if she knew what I’d done? Would she turn away like the rest? I don’t believe she would. Because in a way I can’t explain, way down in my marrow, I know this woman. She’s safe, not broken like me, only a little bruised around the edges, and those bruises, wherever they’ve come from, make me sad for her, in a way I suspect people were once sad for me. No one is sad for me now. And that’s as it should be.
Still, it’s a frightening thing, this sympathy—unfamiliar territory. My heart has been frozen for so long I can scarcely remember the last time I felt sorry for anyone but myself. Still, I feel it now, thawing like a glacier that’s drifted too far south, leaving me exposed and uncertain on this slippery new ground. I don’t know Lane Kramer’s story, or who left her black-and-blue. I only know I’m willing to risk the finding out.