CHAPTER ONE
THERE WERE376 steps from one end of my property to the other. Not that I’d walked them, mind you, but I counted them as the man who jogged past every day, rain or shine, made his way down the road. I’d begun to accept his presence in my world, but it didn’t start out that way. At first I found him to be a terrifying intrusion. I hated people anywhere near my house. I’d moved to the outskirts of my hometown of Fall Harbor, Maine, for just that reason. After what happened, I needed to be alone. And now this guy seemed intent on destroying my peace.
My place wasn’t on the beaten path. Hell, if truth be told, you had to actively come out this way to find it, because it took almost thirty minutes by car to reach the town square twenty miles away. I valued my privacy, and I paid a great deal to ensure I kept it.
Then he came along.
The first several days after I spotted him, I cowered in my home, because seeing him so close disturbed me. It had been better than a month since the last time I’d seen someone on my road, which really went nowhere. After you made the turn down the way, it became a dead end that forced you to turn around and come back the same path. Which meant I saw him twice a day. And twice a day I went into a near meltdown.
Because of him, gone were the days I saw no one, interacted with not a single soul. I had it arranged so my lawyer took care of any bills, I grew most of my own food, and what I couldn’t grow was delivered to the edge of my lot, where, after much inspection, it could be brought into the house, sorted, and put away in its proper place. All that changed the day he huffed past my house and turned my world upside down.
He couldn’t be more than thirty, with brown hair that came down to his collar and slapped him in the face when it dripped with sweat as he ran. His toned body seemed to be acres of golden skin, dusted with a light coating of soft brown fur. Yes, I looked. In fact, I studied him in detail, this threat to my sanity.
It seemed as though his existence altered the feng shui of the place. Not that I believed in that, of course. But everything had to be just so, and any deviation left me out of sorts. I knew the deer that crossed my land every day, stopping to nibble on the tender shoots in the spring, then huddled against the cold in the deepest of winter. There had been a family of lark sparrows nesting in one of my trees every year since I’d gotten here, and I woke to their song in the morning. The black and bright yellow sunflowers I planted every eighteen inches in front of the house bloomed together, a product of water and sunshine. It all had to be just so.
Then he came along.
I thought, after the first day, he’d disappear. It would have made me happy, because huddling beneath my window angered me. I had no idea how or why he came here, because this road wasn’t made for running. With the steep hills and sharp curves, it could actually be pretty treacherous.
The first time I saw him, it took me nearly eight hours to calm myself. I had to go through and touch everything to ensure it was still in place, because my hands shook until I did. Then he came back the next day, and the cycle repeated itself.
I tried calling the sheriff, but he laughed and assured me no law existed about people running on the road. When I protested, he got snippy.
“Did he come onto your property?” he asked, and I could hear the annoyance in his clipped cadence.
“Well, no, but—”
“Then I’m sorry, Matt. I can’t do anything about it. He’s free to run wherever he sees fit.”
“Can’t you at least suggest he find somewhere else?” I pleaded.
When his voice took on the pitying tone I knew so well, I wanted to hang up. “You know, it would do you good to have some company out there,” he told me. “Maybe you should try to talk to the man. Invite him in for some of that weird tea you brew up.”
“Mom could tell you to do it,” I countered.
Yeah, the sheriff, Clayton Bailey Bowers, was, by two years, my younger brother.
“Pretty sure that Mom would agree with me,” he drawled. “She doesn’t like you living out in the woods like that anyway. Why can’t you come back to town and live like….”
He paused a breath too long.
“Like a normal person?” I demanded. “That’s what you were going to say, right?”
Clay let loose with a long, aggrieved sigh. “It’s been thirteen years, Matt. You won’t come to see Mom or me. You won’t allow us to come and visit you. Hell, even your friends have stopped asking after you.”
Friends. I suppose that’s what they thought they were, but I never had that connection with them. “Acquaintances” I’d have to agree to, but not much beyond that. Ever since what’s referred to by most people as “the incident,” I’ve had the need to be alone, to stay as far away from people as I can. The incident shattered my world, and now I desperately needed to make sure I held it together. It’s why familiarity had become so important to me.
I was a high school student at the time. We’d celebrated my sixteenth birthday three weeks before that, and Mom had gotten me a beater car, a lemon-yellow Toyota with nearly seventy thousand miles on it. The car was well traveled, and every time I drove her, I imagined we were taking part in history. I loved that car, probably more than my brother at the time. If I’d had to choose between him and the car… well, it was a good thing the situation never came up.
We’d been having some weird weather that spring. A lot of rain, sometimes even mixed with snow. Then the next day, the temperatures would soar into the eighties. One of the teachers, Mr. Jackson, told me his car had died in the parking lot, and he wondered if I could give him a ride home. I never liked the man. He gave off this creepy vibe, and a lot of people commented on it. But like an idiot, I said sure. His smile and cheery thanks made my stomach queasy.
He gave me directions, and I found myself in a field pretty far from town. Everything in me screamed to turn around and go back, but I swallowed down my fear.
“You live out here? It’s kind of far from school.”
He put an arm around me and pulled me close. Oh my God, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I tried to push away from him, but he held fast, bringing his mouth to mine. In a panic, I laid on the horn. He jerked back, his pupils blown. He gave me some sort of sick grin and leaned forward again. I tried to hit him as I screamed for him to get away from me.
“You knew why we were coming out here,” Mr. Jackson said, grabbing a handful of my hair. And the sick thing was he seemed genuinely certain I’d come out here for that reason.
