Val followed her mother’s trim form up the running path from the Kingshead Woods back to the house. It was a tradition of theirs, these mother-daughter runs. Three mornings a week, six miles each, and no amount of missing girls or panicked neighbors would change that.
As they passed the Althouse cottage, running lightly in single file—her mother in the lead, always—Val thought to herself, Eyes front, Val. Just keep running. Eyes front.
But she couldn’t resist.
Mine.
She glanced right.
A canvas hammock stretched between two oak trees that grew on the cottage’s eastern lawn, and Marion and her mother, clinging to each other like two people lost at sea, lay inside it.
Val’s heart skipped sweetly along her ribs.
Her eyes flicked to her mother, then back to the hammock. The running path took them near enough for Val to hear that Marion was humming something, a song Val didn’t know.
Val’s mother waved at the Althouses. “I’ll come check on you after I shower!” she called out, gesturing at herself. It made Val cringe, that false bright note in her mother’s voice. Lucy Mortimer was not accustomed to being so chummy with the help, and it showed. “We’ll have lunch, all right?”
Marion waved at them as they passed. Mrs. Althouse had snuggled up beside her like a child. A book lay facedown on Marion’s stomach. She stroked her mother’s hair, graying where Marion’s was black as a starless night. Val wondered what it would feel like, to be curled up beside Marion’s safe, solid body like that, and talk for hours, hiding nothing, pretending nothing.
She wondered if Marion also couldn’t stop thinking about the previous night in the barn. If, in Val’s arms, Marion had felt as seen and obvious and expansive and fully realized as Val had in hers.
Then Val’s stomach lurched.
A cruel inner fist punched her ribs before plummeting down to slam against her pelvis.
Val stumbled over a tree root, and coughed, gasping for breath.
Her mother caught her by the arm.
“Was that him?” she asked, a slight tremor in her voice.
Val nodded. She touched her neck; her throat burned, like she’d recently gotten sick. “Yes,” she whispered, “but I don’t know why.”
A lie. She suspected why: he’d noticed her noticing Marion.
Or, he knew what Marion had done, and he knew Val had seen it, too. And he wondered why she had yet to say anything to him about it.
Her mother, expressionless, shook Val free and ran ahead, as if it were imperative to put distance between them. Val did not look back at Marion, but she felt the pull of her all the way up the hill and into Kingshead, like the call of a warm bed after an endless winter.