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“Why did you never tell me you dreamed that?”
He glanced at her. “I didn’t want you to worry on me. We had enough to worry about back then.”
Her eyebrows had pulled inward as she stared at him. “And you still dream it?”
His shoulders lifted. “Occasionally. I thought that once you went to live with the Flagtons that the dream would stop because I knew where you were. I knew you were safe.” He looked away from her. “But it didn’t. It only got worse. More frequent. It was years before I didn’t have it every night.”
She nodded, silent for several long breaths. “I am sorry.”
His gaze shifted back to her. “Sorry for what?”
“For not trying harder. For not running away from the Flagtons and then making you leave with me—to somewhere—anywhere. You pushed me back there time and again and I should have pushed back. I only wanted to be with you and I didn’t try hard enough. If I had just tried harder—was stronger—you never would have hated me. Never would have sent me back to them as you did that last time.” Her look shifted forward, her right hand going down into the field to tear out a fat chunk of grass. “If I could have figured a way to get away from them sooner, everything would be different. Everything.”
Her head bowed, the fingers of her left hand plucked the grass from her right and dropped them blade by blade onto her lap.
“What are you doing out here, Pen?”
She glanced at him, her bottom lip jutting up. “I am fine. No harm has come to me. People are wary of the deep dark—this time between when the drunks pass out and when the bakers rise. It is the true witching hour. But I have always held these moments in the night tight to my chest. It is the only time I can find peace. The only time I can escape the house without Mrs. Flagton knowing.”
Brushing the grass off her lap, she lay back down on the knoll, her stare up into the blackness of the night. Her left forefinger pointed upward to the sky. “The stars. I find that one. The one that always looks particularly bright and is surrounded by those other three. I stare at it and imagine you, somewhere, lying on your back, with your arm up and tucked under your head. You can’t sleep, just like me. And your eyes scan the sky and then they pause. Pause on the very same star that I am looking at. And just like that we’re connected. Connected once more, no matter how far apart we are. All those years, I never knew where you were. But with that star, that one right there, I always knew.” Her left forefinger fell from pointing at the sky and curled toward her, landing lightly on her chest. “You were here. With me. Always. It’s how I never lost hope that I would see you again. I always knew I would.”
He stared at her in wonder. Stared at her mouth, at the certainty of her lips.
Such faith.
He had nightmares. She had stars.
How she had managed to not let that faith extinguish in the last seventeen years was beyond him.
Faith that was unshakeable.
Faith in him.
Faith he was going to have to destroy.
He yanked his stare off of her face and looked across the distance at the three barns that sat along the bottom of the incline. “I was never looking at the stars, Pen. I never thought I’d see you again. You found hope in those stars. I found blackness. Unending darkness that permeated every choice I made, everything I did. The stars guided me in a very different direction.” He pulled his legs upward and rested his forearms on his knees. “One where hope didn’t exist. Only survival. And the things that I had to do to survive have devoured my soul until there is no lightness, no stars left. One cannot take souls—decide death—without the hand of the devil stealing everything inside of you.”
He shook his head and then looked down to his right. He had to say this directly to her so she understood. So she would give up on him for good. “Whatever it is you’re hoping to find in me, you won’t. It’s not there. Not anymore.”
She met his stare. “But what if there is something left in you—something good that you don’t even know exists?”
“That is hope talking. Only idiots hope.”
“Hope made me find you. Hope made me convince you to help me. Hope is easy when it’s all one has.”
“Hope is a fool’s game.”
She pushed herself upright, her gaze meeting his. “For all you want me to give up on you, I don’t know if I can. It would be too easy and my life has never been easy since the fire.”
“Listen to easy.”
“I am trying, but I’m not done with you, Strider. I am still trying to place in my mind what you are now—the man you’ve become. The deaths and suffering you’ve caused. The special cruelty you seem to have reserved just for me. I’m still trying to place all of that against the person I know you to be.”
From her lips, a ‘know’instead of a ‘knew.’So stubborn—continually refusing to accept what he was now.
His jaw shifted to the side, but he refused to look away, drawing up every moment of shame, every moment of pain he’d felt in his life to help him hold fast against her stare that was trying to see into the pits of his soul. “Because you shouldn’t place it—any of it. I’m helping you for one reason. For what you have of my father’s. You don’t need to understand me. You don’t need to like me. We are in different worlds now. Worlds that are intersecting for a short period of time, and then I will walk away from you and never think of you again. Do not mistake this for anything more.”
Her head dropped forward, locks of her blond hair shimmering in the moonlight draping in front of her face. She stayed that way for long seconds, breath after breath.
