He looked up, surprised, and when he saw me, he grinned and began to jog. I shut the window and locked it. When Will reached our room, he wrapped me in his arms and we toppled back onto the bed. I buried my face in his neck. Seeing my expression, he grew still, his brow furrowing.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought you’d left. Or... that something had happened to you.” I heard how odd this sounded and flushed. “The hotel clerk mentioned those robberies, and I just thought...” I trailed off. Really, what had I thought? Why had I panicked at the sight of the empty bed?
Will smiled. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I traced his jaw with my finger. I began to tell him how I had collected things when I was a child. My treasures, I had called them. They were only scraps of driftwood, stones with odd shapes or striations, sometimes an old button or a bit of string I’d found long buried in the dirt. Though I’d hidden my collections, storing them like an animal mindful of future hunger, they were always gone when I returned. For years, I thought I’d simply forgotten my hiding spots. I blamed myself for my losses. They were such little things, but I loved them so. And then, as I grew older, it was my books that went missing. I could not seem to keep track of them. And then my father died, and Bear sold the horses that had brought me such happiness. And then Bear kicked Pal, my dog, and I was convinced that the injury had led him to die in a fight with a coyote years later.
Will lay very still beside me, listening. “Your brother took those things that you loved.”
“He could not stand to see me happy. If something brought me happiness, he destroyed it.”
I did not mention Amir, and how Bear had treated him. It didn’t feel right to bring up Amir as I lay in bed beside Will, but this story was about him, too: because I had treasured him, Bear had hated him. Amir was always in my thoughts. I was sure that Will sensed this.
Will’s eyes moved back and forth between mine. How could someone who had grown up the way he had, loved by a family like his, understand? His arms enveloped me, but I felt alone. My heart sunk.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said again.
It wasn’t enough. He didn’t understand. And how could he when I barely understood myself? I felt myself pulling away from him.
“Merrow,” he said quietly. “Bear isn’t here. He can’t take me from you... unless you let him.”
This was true. I felt Bear’s presence so deeply that it was nearly impossible to convince myself he wasn’t in the room with us, that he had not followed me across the globe to steal my good fortune. I could not let my memory of things he had done to me as a child pull me away from Will.
This was my happiness, and I had a right to it.
Will brushed my hair off my forehead. I kissed him. I slipped my hand under his shirt and felt the warmth of his skin. He moved his hands down my body, pulling me closer to him. I felt a new sense of desperation as I kissed him, a need tofeelmore thanthink. His shirt was off and then his pants and I rocked against him, losing myself to those moments with him when our bodies were connected, my cries ones of pleasure.
Later, when we stumbled blearily from the hotel room and found a café that offered a late breakfast, I told Will that the strange thing was that Bear hated to see me happy, but he also hated to see me sad.
“Or at least, he hated to see me cry,” I said. “It made him angry.”
Will put down his fork. He reached across the table and took my hand. “What do you mean, ‘angry’?”
I blinked. I had never told anyone, but why? For the firsttime, I felt I understood what a disservice Amir and I had done to ourselves to keep Bear’s treatment a secret for all those years. What good had it done us? In the end, we had still wound up separated, and far from home. It had been four years since Amir had disappeared.
“He hit me, sometimes. Or pushed me. But mostly he found other ways to punish me.” I thought for a moment. “The really terrible thing, more than how he hurt me, was the fear I lived with even when he wasn’t hurting me. I rarely felt safe. It was always more psychological than it seemed at the time. Nothing felt stable. I loved my home and I hated it. I even loved Bear at the same moment that I hated him. It was confusing.” I cleared my throat. “And it was always worse for Amir. Always.”
“Oh, Merrow. I’m so sorry. Didn’t anyone see what was happening? I wish I could go back in time. I wish I’d known.”
“I wouldn’t have told you. Amir and I—we made a pact. We didn’t want to be separated. We didn’t want to leave, as crazy as that sounds. Horseshoe Cliff... the farm... the sea... we loved it there. It was our whole world. Even Bear couldn’t destroy our love for it. Or at least we tried not to let him.”
Will nodded, but I knew he could not really understand.
“But eventually Amir ran away, didn’t he?” he asked.
I nodded. “I never heard from him again. And I left, too, with the help of your mother. So Bear managed to get rid of us after all. I guess in the end he won.”
“No,” Will said. He had not let go of my hand. “I don’t think he did.”
WILL CHARTERED Ayacht to take us from Portofino to Monterosso al Mare, one of the towns of Cinque Terre. There, our pace slowed. We took long naps under colorful umbrellas on the beach and swam in the ocean. The Ligurian Sea was shockingly warm—an entirely different swimming experience than the one offered by the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Northern California. When I swam in California, I was always moving. I rarely allowed myself to simply bob in the water; it was too cold. The Mediterranean encouraged floating, and we obliged. I learned that Will, like his sister, Emma, was a strong swimmer. Still, while I would happily float about for an hour or longer, Will would head back to shore much sooner. He would kiss me before swimming away, teasing that he feared if I stayed out much longer, I would turn into my namesake and slip away from him forever.
If the sea encouraged floating, the town encouraged eating. A boat pulled up to the beach and offered plump anchovies and mussels in paper cups piled high with slices of lemon. For lunch, we had dry white wine and focaccia slathered with pesto.
In the afternoons, we retreated to our hotel room’s shaded balcony overlooking the sun-soaked coastline. We sat in our bathing suits and let the breeze from the sea wash over us. Will read while I wrote. I had not really decided what I was working on. I wrote descriptions of the Italian landscape, snippets of dialogue. I lost myself in a world that was half real, half imagined.
It was there, on the balcony in Cinque Terre, that the sensation of being watched overcame me again for the first time since Will and I had shared that kiss months earlier in San Francisco. On a path below our balcony, a dark-haired man paused and thenwalked toward the sea. His bare torso was lanky; his skin brown. My heart raced. I leaned forward in my seat, Amir’s name on my tongue—
