“Then why?” I asked, though of course he did not need to respond. I could feel his words traveling through me even before he spoke them.
“I came back because I want my body to be where my heart has always been.” He reached for my hand.
“But Amir,” I said gently, and with some trouble. “I’m with Will. We’re engaged.”
“You’re not married yet. You’ve known him a long time. What have you been waiting for?”
I didn’t have an answer. “Why do you want Horseshoe Cliff? Everything Bear put you through... didn’t it poison the place for you?”
Amir gave me a sad smile. “No. I had you, my antidote to every poison.”
Tears stung my eyes. “How is that possible?” I asked. “How can we feel that way when it was always so hard? When therewas never enough to eat? For so many years, we were alone with Bear and his rage. There was no one to look after us or love us the way a parent would.”
I watched, almost as though in a trance, as Amir lifted my hand. He pressed his lips to my skin. “It’s possible because we had each other.”
Yes. Without Amir, I would have looked back on my childhood and seen the gaping loss where love should have been. Instead, I thought of how we built towers made of smooth gray stones. I thought of running through a veil of fog in the eucalyptus grove. I thought of swimming beside him in the icy sea, each of us daring the other to go farther, to be stronger. I thought of lying on the dirt floor of the shed, under the gaze of the red birds we had made, laughing and sharing stories. I thought of us singing together in a cave that glowed at sunset.
Who would I have been without Amir? I had no interest in knowing. My love for him was as surprising and nourishing and true as the plants that broke through the soil my father was told could never sustain a garden. Our love was a sprout of green, a burst of wild and unexpected beauty.
And yet—this knowledge pained me. What could I do with my love for Amir, and his love for me, when I also loved Will? I pulled my hand from Amir’s.
“You’ll pay Bear for his share of the land, won’t you?”
Amir’s face clouded. He released a sharp laugh. “You don’t pay for things that you win.”
“But where will he go?”
“I don’t care. As long as he’s not at Horseshoe Cliff.”
It was as hard to think of Horseshoe Cliff without thinking of Bear as it was to think of Horseshoe Cliff without thinking of Amir.
“Drive up there with me,” he said. “It’s our land now. You must want to see it.”
He was right. I longed for Horseshoe Cliff. I wasn’t sure if I could have faced it again without Amir by my side, but with him... I wasn’t sure there was anything that could have kept me away.
IN THE HOUSEI shared with Will, nothing looked quite as it had before my walk with Amir. Usually when I opened the front door and stepped inside, I felt contentment wash over me, but now I felt only unease. The smooth walnut table that held an oversized book of photographs of the Great Barrier Reef, the painted ceramic wine carafe that Will and I had bought together in Rab, an island off the coast of Croatia, even the framed photographs of the two of us that dotted the mantel, all took on a disconcertingly unfamiliar sheen. I paused in the entryway, peering into the rooms that surrounded me. I had a feeling of time folding over itself. I was fifteen years old, walking through a stranger’s house, studying her life. The jeans I wore were too big—boys’ jeans, once Bear’s—and tattered at every hem. The backs of my hands were sun-darkened, my nails dirty and gnawed short. But my heart was buoyant with the understanding that I was not alone in this life.I love,thumped its steady beat.And I am loved.
“Merrow?”
I blinked. Will walked toward me from the doorway to the kitchen.
“Are you all right? Did something happen?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes, I’m fine.”
He led me to the den. I had come to love that room more than I’d thought I would, considering it offered no view of the ocean. It was smaller than most of the rooms in the house, but it was always warm and dark, the perfect spot to curl against my fiancé and watch a movie.
Now, though, something in the room seemed wrong. It was the rug, I thought. I’d shopped for it with Rosalie. We’d chosen a burgundy color that now struck me as ugly. It wasn’t Rosalie’s fault; we’d both fallen in love with it at the store, running our hands over it as though it were a living thing that might feel our affection and return it.
Remembering how happy I had been to spend that day with Rosalie, a surge of sorrow rose within me.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked again, guiding me to sit beside him on the sofa. “Tell me. Did Amir say why he came back?”
“He wants Horseshoe Cliff. And he wants to make Bear suffer.” I didn’t voice the other reason that Amir had returned. “You know how awful Bear was to us when we were kids, and he always treated Amir worse than he treated me. In a way, even once Amir left, the torturing didn’t stop for him. He’s been haunted by what Bear subjected him to, the physical and mental abuse. I think he’d like to ruin Bear’s life.”
Will put his arm around my shoulders. “Oh, Merrow.”
“I don’t blame him. Most of me believes that Bear deserves whatever is coming to him.”
