Drizzle. Gray country roads.
Houses. Kids’ tricycles.
Cornfields. Dilapidated silos. Rolling hills.
Rain scrabbling against her windshield. The storm had swooped in swiftly. Natalie turned her wipers on. There was static on the radio.
She listened to the rain pounding on the roof of the car. A hollow sound.
Too much rain. The rivers would flood. The lakes would rise.
Exhaustion had taken hold. She was lost. Buried alive under layers of grief—some old, some new. Now the white pickup turned down an unmarked road, and Natalie couldn’t spot any street signs. She didn’t know where they were. Her senses grew heightened. There was barely any traffic at this hour: 3:45 A.M.
The hardest part of any surveillance was remaining invisible. Natalie pulled over to the side of the road and parked. It was dark out, a good thing. The darker the better. She hunkered down and waited, until she was sure it was okay to proceed.
She sat trembling with inner tension, idling on the soft shoulder while she watched the truck heading down the two-lane road and turning left onto a driveway between two stone gateposts, KEEP OUT signs posted on either side of the entrance.
She let another minute or two pass before she drove toward the stone gateposts, lights off, and paused in front of the driveway. It went up a steep hill into pitch blackness. No house lights up there, with thick woods all around. She drove for twenty more yards before pulling over to the side of the road and parking. The car squeaked to a jerky stop.
She phoned Luke.
“Hello?” he answered groggily.
“Hey, it’s me.”
She could sense the tension in his voice. “Natalie, what’s up?”
“I found him.”
“What’s that?”
“I found the man with the birthmark on his arm. The butterfly.”
Long pause. She could hear him breathing into the receiver.
“Where are you?” Luke asked.
“Up north.”
“Where up north, Natalie?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I found him.”
“Turn around and come home, okay? We can follow up in the morning.”
“Luke?” she said. “I know I’m in shock. Emotional shock. I understand I may not be acting in my own best interests right now. That I’m all over the place. But I have to see what he’s up to. Because I know it’s him, beyond a shadow of a doubt. No one else has that birthmark. It’s Samuel Winston. His full name is Samuel Hawke Winston, as in ‘What the hawk eats.’ He has a wife and kids in Thaddeus Falls … but for some reason, he didn’t go home tonight. He drove farther north, and that’s where I am now.”
“Natalie…”
She hung up.
A few moments later, her phone buzzed. It was Luke again. She redirected the call to voice mail and sat in her car, trying to muster up the courage to act. She listened to the hum of the engine. The woods used to make her feel protected. But that was an illusion. Nobody was safe. Not really.
Natalie’s father used to say A secret is like a magic mirror, with endless layers of illusion. What you assume to be fact isn’t always real.
What was real? She didn’t have any answers. The world was a thousand shades of gray. She knew what she’d been trained to do. She’d been trained to set aside her emotions in the heat of the moment and follow procedure. But the heat of this moment was burning her insides.
Natalie could feel her fright at the base of her throat. Boom, boom, boom. “Reactance” was a psychological term used for children who did the opposite of whatever they were told. Psychiatrists would try to break a child’s reactance by using reverse psychology. Go ahead and do it. You have my permission.
Natalie told herself that. Go ahead and do it.
She hoped it would have the opposite effect.
But it didn’t.
She turned off her ticking engine, got out of the car, and looked at the sky. The rain was coming down in a steady downpour. The moon had vanished behind the roiling clouds. The higher you looked, the more frenetic the air became—a swirling, frenzied fury. She heard a few high-pitched cries—a squall of birds swooping underneath the storm clouds.
Thunder rumbled. She pulled up the hood of her jacket and shivered all over, eyes going wide in the dark. Fear flickering in her heart. She headed for the old stone gateposts, cracked and in disrepair. She stood at the entryway and gazed up the driveway into a charred nothingness. A wet wind blew through trees. The rusty old mailbox had a name on it—HAWKE. Listening to her own panicky breathing, she started up the driveway on foot, fright bubbling up her spine.