The man had built her daughter a desk and given her family a safe harbor, and he asked for nothing back with such perfect consistency that her search for reasons to be suspicious of him kept coming up empty, no matter how many times she ran the search.
“Any news?”he asked as he got the tea steeping and set the usual timer on the stove.
“It’s confirmed,” she said.“All of it.The account was his.The driver’s license photo is Winston’s face.Reno says it should clear probate in a few weeks.”And then, because she was constitutionally incapable of holding back the truth these days, “The account comes to three million, one hundred and six thousand dollars.And change.”
Hank went still.
It wasn’t for long.The length of a skipped heartbeat, a hitch a person would need a month of reading the man’s fine print to even see.
Then he lurched into motion and did everything right.He said that was good news.He said he was glad the kids’ college was handled.Said he was glad her shoulders could finally come down from her ears.He even said Winston owed her ten times that and the world had only paid her back a portion of what she deserved.Every word of it was kind and true and sounded exactly like him.
But in the middle of all those right words, she realized something had gone missing from their delivery.She knew him too well to miss it.
“What will you do?”he asked.His voice was careful.Neutral.“You can do anything now, Sunny.Anything you want.Go anywhere.”
Said by any other man on earth, it would have sounded like freedom.Said by this one, in that level doctor’s voice, it sounded like a man being very careful not to hold her back in any way.
“I don’t know yet,” she said, which was the honest entry, and she watched something close behind his eyes like a door shutting until it was just shy of latching.
The timer buzzed.Neither of them moved for a second too long, and then they both moved at once Their hands tangled at the stove, and both of them apologized, and the tea steeped a minute past right and tasted faintly bitter when she finally sipped hers.
They drank it standing in the half-dark of the stove vent’s light, the way they always did when they didn’t have something serious to talk about that drove them to the table.
He asked after Presley and the twins’ telescope shopping and she told him it was going well if you thought each one of them wanting a different telescope constituted going well.
He laughed in the right places and smiled when he should have.But the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, and she clocked his unnatural stillness.The missing warmth.The careful, generous distance inyou cango anywhere.A man doesn’t flinch at three million dollars of good news.Not unless, in his mind, that money is seen as a loss.
On the porch she rose on her toes in the dark and kissed him goodnight.It was the same kiss as every night before, except that his hands stayed at his sides the way they always did.Tonight, though, it bothered her.
She drove home past the lit houses of Cobbler Cove, the lake reflecting cold gray moonlight at the end of Hank’s street.She was nearly back to the rental before she admitted to herself that she was scared.She knew better than anyone alive what secrets and lies hidden behind the right words and the right smile sounded like.
She sat in the rental’s driveway until the engine ticked itself completely quiet.Then she went inside, checked the locks, kissed her sleeping children one by one, and somewhere in the back of her chest, without ever quite deciding to, she got out her pencil.
16
Hank’s dream came back that night, but changed.
It still started kind.But the kitchen it started in this time was his own kitchen in Cobbler Cove, and the woman standing at the stove with the morning sun on her face was Sunny.She was laughing at something he’d said, and the kettle was climbing toward its whistle behind her, and the light through the wavy old window glass lay across the floor she’d brought back from the dead.
Then the light went wrong.
The kitchen stretched and elongated into a courtroom, and she was sitting across from him at the accuser’s table.Her mouth shaped words, but the voice that came out of her came from all around him.
You ruined my life.You ruined me.
He reached for her, and she didn’t dissolve into smoke between his fingers the way Lorraine always did.She did something worse.
She picked up her coat off the chair, calm as a Tuesday, and walked out of the courtroom.She never looked back, and the courtroom door, that looked exactly like his front door, closed quietly behind her with a soft thud.
Hank woke with his heart slamming against his ribs.He lay still in the darkness of not quite morning and waited for the worst of it to pass and his heart adrenaline to drain away.
It didn’t pass.The dream sat down on his chest and stayed with him.
It dawned on him that nightmares about the past could be woken up from and dismissed because they’d already happened.This dream wasn’t leaving him because it was a forecast of awful things to come.
Shaken to the depths of his being, he got up and dressed in the dark.He let himself out into the first gray stirrings of morning, the way he had many times before.
The street was the same.Mabel Brown’s lilacs had gone brown and papery along her fence.The lake at the end of the street lay flat as sheet metal, and the mountains beyond had their heads in the clouds.It was already warm out and muggy.Gonna be a blistering hot one today.Maybe some thunderstorms later on.
