The screen said EASTON.
Rook glanced at it and then looked back at the road.
“You want me to—“ I started. “I can read—”
I stopped and put my hand back in my lap.
He reached down with his right hand, picked it up, and held it out across the console to me without looking away from the road.
“Read it to me,” he said.
Chapter eighteen
Rook
He read it twice to himself. I watched the second time happen in my peripheral vision.
“It’s long,” he said. “He uses punctuation.”
“He would.”
“Periods, Rook. Commas. A hockey guy texting in complete sentences. It’s unsettling. I don’t trust it.”
“Out loud.”
He read it to the windshield, slow.
Easton:Mattias. I remember you. The serious kid who stayed after every skate. I’m not angry and I haven’t been for a long time, so we can set that part down right away. What happened to me wasn’t done by a twenty-one-year-old who moved three feet down a bench. It was done by men with a lot more power than you had, and I think you’ve always known that. But I’m not going to tell you that you owe me nothing, because that would beits own kind of lie, and I’m too far out here to bother with those anymore. I made my peace. I’ve got a rink and a beer league and a learn-to-skate class full of six-year-olds who can’t stand up, and I am, against all odds, a happy man. So if you’re reaching out because you’re carrying something, then put it down. Don’t carry it. Spend it on the next one. There’s always a next one. Yours, Alan
The exits started naming lakes. Pine trees crowded both sides of the highway. I said nothing about the message.
Alan Easton was the cautionary tale I used as mortar in the walls I built. Now, he’d written to tell me he was, against all odds, a happy man. He kindly requested that I stop using his life as a reason to wreck my own.
I didn’t feel relief. It was closer to the moment after you set down something heavy, and the muscle keeps firing, still braced for a weight that’s gone.
“You okay?” Varga asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s allowed.” He looked at the phone for a second longer. Then he set it in the cupholder and left it there.
“Your mother said before dark,” I said.
“My mother says a lot of things.”
“She said the lake road ices by four.”
“It’s been icing by four since 1987. My mother has never been wrong about it.” He pointed. “There. The mailbox shaped like a loon. Turn before the loon.”
The road turned to gravel and ran through a forest of birch and black spruce. I cracked my window and took in the resinous scent. Varga had gone quiet beside me.
Then the trees opened, and there was the house.
It sat low and long on a rise above the lake, a contemporary log build with honey-colored timber and big windows under a green metal roof. A stone chimney pushed pale smoke up into the cold sky.
A porch ran along the front, with a cord of split wood stacked neatly and head-high against the near end. Someone had strung the rail with early Christmas lights, warm and white. Two trucks and a hatchback were parked near the house, and a pair of snowshoes hung by the door beside a row of boots lined up on a mat.
Past the house, down a slope, was the lake.
