CHAPTER 23

For a long time, we didn’t speak. I watched the clock, counting seconds, waiting for the numbers to change. Once. Twice. Outside, the wind was growing stronger, the treetops tossing wildly as their delicate spines bent this way, then that. The spitting rain smacked the windshield. One heavy drop. A long silence, and then another, then three more in rapid fire.

I twisted my hands in my lap and spoke without looking at him.

“Craig . . .” I began, then faltered before finding the end of the sentence. “He’s an asshole,” I finished lamely.

“Yes,” James replied. “He can be. But that’s how it is, isn’t it? People can do things, they can do terrible things, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?” he asked.

The air in the car seemed suddenly thick, and too hot. I cracked my window before meeting his eyes.

“If you’re talking about yourself, it’s not the same thing,” I said, quietly.

“But not exactly different, either.”

It was James’s turn to watch the clock, one hand still gripping the steering wheel, the other rubbing against the hard angles of his face. I watched him pinch the bridge of his nose, push his fingertips over the high curve of his forehead and into the mussed tangle of his hair.

“I knew exactly what I was doing,” he said, finally. “I saw a way to hurt you first, on purpose, and I took it.”

I snapped my head up so quickly that the tendons in my neck clenched painfully, pulling stiff and tight in the spot just below my ear. He watched me carefully, as though weighing what to say next, then began talking again, faster now.

“You’ve been thinking this was your fault, too. I know you have. No”—he held up a hand as I began to speak—“don’t. I need to say this. This is the part where I talk.”

I sat back and stared.

“I knew I was wrecking everything,” he said. “But I was angry, and I was scared, and so I hurt you on purpose.”

It was quiet again. Even the spitting of the rain had stopped, there was no hard smack of droplets against the windshield. In a faraway corner of my mind, I thought what a shame it would be if the storm had passed us by. If we were left the same as we’d been, in the grip of dust and drought, no better off for all we’d been through.

James cleared his throat, and this time, he took my hand.

“And I’m sorry. You already know that I’m sorry, but I just wanted you to know, also—I wanted you to know, I know better than that. I knew better. My mom . . . she raised me better than that.”

My face flushed, and I bit back tears, bit down against the urge to fall into his arms the way I would have done only a few short weeks before. I wanted nothing more than to collapse there, to bury my face in his shirt and close my eyes and allow sleep to overtake me while I breathed in the scents of detergent and sweat and old smoke.

Instead, I forced myself to let go of his hand.

“James, we can talk about this another time. Because if Craig didn’t do this . . . we have to go to the police.”

He gave me a long look, opened his mouth, hesitated and then said, “There’s something—”

His voice was drowned in noise as the sky suddenly lit overhead. A jagged scar of electric white opened across the sky, accompanied at the same time by a terrifying, earsplitting crack of thunder.

Rain or not, the storm had arrived. Around the perimeter of the field, silhouetted against the low sky, the trees waved as though trying to uproot themselves from the ground and shed their leaves into the whirling, screaming wind.

I yelped at the loudness of the sound and looked wide-eyed out the window. “Jesus? Are we okay in here?”

James was still staring at me, motionless and pale in the weak green light from the dashboard.

“James!” I said.

He snapped to attention and peered out into the dark. There was another flash of lightning.

“You’re right, we should find a better place,” he said. His movements were frantic as he turned the key in the ignition, listened as the engine coughed and then purred, looked once over his shoulder and then threw the truck into gear. I reached for my seat belt as he hit the accelerator.

The truck lurched but didn’t move.

“Shit,” he said, his voice too loud after so much confessional soft talk. “Shit!”

“Try it again,” I said, peering out into the dark. There was another crack and flash, this one even closer. “That looked like it hit somewhere in town.”

James pressed the pedal again. We both listened as the wheels spun and did not grip.

“I must have landed in a rut,” he growled, unbuckling his seat belt and reaching behind him. When he turned back to me, he had a flashlight in his hand.

“Where are you going?”

“There might be a rock or something I can use for leverage,” he said. He jumped down, stepping into the wind. His hair began to toss furiously around his head.

I started to unbuckle my own seat belt. “I’ll help you!”

“No,” he shouted over the wind. “Stay there! I’ll just be a minute!”

The door slammed, and he disappeared. I felt the truck shift, slightly, as he leaned against it, testing to see how stuck we really were. In the dim, ghostly beams of the headlights, I could see the deep, dry furrows that ran haphazardly across the field. A summer without rain had turned this place into a mess of holes. It was amazing that we’d made it this far.

There was a tap at the window—I looked up to see James pointing behind the car, back the way we had come. He held up his index finger—one more second—then disappeared again into the dark.

A minute passed, and then another. I peered at the rearview mirror, catching a brief glimpse of the flashlight as it played over the close line of the forest, watching it sweep and then bob away between the trees. Alone, I couldn’t stop my thoughts from running crazily in circles, tracing back from James’s confession to the terrible sight of Craig’s broken body as they hoisted him into the ambulance.

All for nothing. And the dead girl . . .

I put my head in my hands and moaned. I had been so stupid, so fucking stupid.

I needed a cigarette.

Peering again into the dark—I thought I saw the flashlight briefly, bobbing between the trees—I reached for the catch on the glove compartment. James had always kept cigarettes here, had grinned at me as he opened the glove box and pointed to them, sitting alongside the insurance and registration. “Necessities!” he had said, and I had laughed, and so had he.

I smiled weakly at the memory as I pulled the pack toward me, only to fumble and drop it to the floor when another, enormous thunderclap sounded overhead. Reaching down, feeling in the area near my feet, my fingers finally brushed its slick cardboard face. I grasped it, at the same time looking hopefully into the glove box for matches. Or a lighter. There was something there, I thought, the glint of polished silver just underneath the registration papers.

I closed my hand around the object.

Pulled it from the glove compartment.

Smiled briefly as I realized what it was—James, this is awfully fancy—and opened the worn catch to look inside.

I hadn’t moved, had frozen in place with my hands clamped tightly in my lap, when James climbed back into the car. A rush of damp wind came behind him, lifting my hair and caressing my neck with soft fingers. He was breathing hard as he slammed the door.

“All right, I think we’re good,” he said, dropping the flashlight behind his seat. “I found a rock that’s big enough and if we just—Becca? Are you okay?”

I shook my head, just barely. The blood that rushed in my ears, the wind howling outside, all seemed to say, Shhh.

Shhh, don’t tell.

Shhh, keep quiet.

Shhh.

I swallowed hard.

Struggled.

My head had never felt so heavy, my eyes never so unwilling to look into his face.

A face I knew.

A face I loved.

A face I had traced the lines of with my fingers so many times, I knew it as well as my own.

James was staring at me. His eyes traveled down the length of my neck, across my heaving chest, over my tightly clasped hands and down, down to the floor, where cellophane and smooth cardboard shone whitely between my feet.

“Becca,” he said, again. The sound of his voice made my hair stand on end.

I forced myself to look up, to look at him, to look into the face of the boy I had loved and trusted and believed. All summer long. In my lap, my hands fell open as though of their own accord.

Staring up, immediately recognizable in the dark, was a face.

The wide gray eyes and frozen smile of Amelia Anne Richardson.

I took a deep breath, and everything inside of me fell through the floor.

“It was you.”