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One word. One little, four-letter word, and it obliterated everything.
Home.
For a split second, Ian didn't care about Elliot's pain or his face or his life. He wanted to rip the man's heart out and bury him in a cold, unmarked grave where no one would ever find the body, and pretend it had never happened.
He wanted ... oh, Jesus, he wanted it to be yesterday
again.
Chapter Twenty-two
Ian stood on the porch, arms crossed, eyes at half-mast. He didn't move, barely breathed. He felt stiff and fragile, as if a single touch could shatter him.
The stranger was Selena's husband. Word had spread in a heartbeat, growing louder and louder, punctuated by great, keening cries of sorrow. Even the inmates knew what it meant that Elliot had come.
He envied them their ability to grieve. Ian couldn't seem to do it. He felt numb, empty inside. He tried to find some remnant of the man he'd once been, and found that there was nothing left of that bitter, cynical loner, no more cold casing on his heart. Now he was the man Selena had turned him into, and he felt life so sharply, he couldn't hide from it anymore. The pain was a throbbing, burning ache in his chest.
Woodenly he'd ordered Edith to prepare a room for Elliot, then he'd watched the old man shuffle away. But not far enough, just down the hall. Behind the closed door, the stranger waited for the dawn.
Ian wished Elliot were young and handsome and wealthy; that, Ian could deal with, could beat to a bloody pulp and walk away from. Anything but a scarred old man who'd searched for his wife and said he didn't know how he'd live without her.
He stared out at the night. She was out there somewhere, in the rainy darkness. He'd watched her run
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from the house more than half an hour ago, and he told himself to let her be, that it would hurt too much to see her, but he'd known. Known he would go after her.
Ah, but what would he say?
Ian walked slowly down the creaking porch steps and into the night, across the gravelly path, toward the forest. Overhead, the sky was a rolling, pregnant gray belly, disgorging itself with a stinging shower of cold droplets. Rain pattered the trees, smacked the leaves and pelted his face. He went into the forest and felt his way along the path, touching the strong, rough trunks of the trees.
Stepping over the fallen log, he wound through the darkness and found her where he'd expected to, huddled in the wet ferns and mushrooms in her secret place.
For a moment, he didn't say anything, just drank in the sight of her, letting the moment crystallize into a memory. She sat kneeling amidst the shadowy foliage, soaking wet, her head bent, her hands full of trinkets. He knew what she held: a shell, worn smooth by the sea's endless kiss; a dried skein of kelp, twisted and blackened by the damp earth; the pale gray ball of her worry stone; and the bit of broken blue glass that reminded her of his eyes.
The grief came on him so hard, with such a cold, stinging slap, that for a moment he couldn't breathe.
"Selena." Her name fell from his lips, a whisper, a prayer.
She didn't answer, just closed her eyes and reached out her hand.
He surged forward and dropped to his knees beside her, taking hold of her hand, clinging to it.
At his touch, she made a small, choking sound of grief and shook her head. Then, slowly, she opened her eyes. Rain slid down her face in rivulets, dripped off the end of her nose and collected on her full lower lip. Her eyes were red and puffy.
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There were so many things to say, and yet there was nothing at all. He felt a surge of bitterness. She'd come to him as an empty shell, a lump of clay, and begged to be molded by him, instructed and rounded. And he'd done it, he'd opened her mind to the universe of poetry and literature and romance. He'd searched within himself for the goodness, and once he'd found it, he defined it and offered it to her.
If only he hadn't found that goodness inside himself. If only he hadn't taught her so well.
He wanted to beg her not to leave him, wanted to crawl on his knees and beg her to have no honor.
She looked at him. "I have been thinking and thinking." She gave him a watery smile. "So much, my head aches and my eyes feel as if they are on fire. I keep wanting this to be a decision, and yet... there is no decision, is there?"
There it was, the truth that had beaten him, stripped away his soul and left him with nothing but broken dreams. She would see the decision as no decision at all; he'd known that immediately, and though he wanted to doubt it, he couldn't.
