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Maybe because it was essentially a part of me.
I didn’t ever take it off.
Looking for it would be like looking for your own foot. You knew it was there. You didn’t think to check for it.
But it was gone.
A simple silver ring on a chain.
It wasn’t worth much, not really. No one would want it but me. But I did. I wanted it.
No.
I didn’t just want it.
I had to get it back.
I shot off the bed, slipping my feet back into the borrowed bright yellow flip-flops. The tab was threatening to break through the flimsy foam, worn down by the owner who had somehow forgotten them.
But they would do.
I didn’t even remember grabbing the key or sliding the lock or tucking the money away.
Because, in the moment, the only thing I could seem to focus on was the loss, the part of me in the woods, the one precious item I had that someone had ripped from me, tossed to the forest floor like it was garbage.
Much like me.
I didn’t process the fact that it was a walk that could take half a day, even if I walked in a straight line, even if I knew where I was going.
All I knew was I had to go, had to get into the woods again.
Sometime later, I made my way into them, feeling them somehow both opening their arms to me, then closing around me at the same time.
It was both comforting and terrifying.
But my mind didn’t think about things it should have been considering.
Bears.
Coyotes.
Tripping over a tree limb, slamming my head into a stump, and dying where no one would ever find me.
Or even things like, with darkness getting closer and closer, it would be impossible even to see the necklace. Even if – by a very off-chance – I was anywhere near where I lost it.
I couldn’t claim to know how many acres of land the Pine Barrens covered, but even if it was only fifty or a hundred – and I was pretty sure it was infinitely larger than that – there was only a very small chance I could find it. Even in good light.
The thoughts wouldn’t seem to stick, though. Wouldn’t let me choose prudence, wouldn’t make me turn around, go back to the motel, come back in the daylight when I had time to search. Preferably with some kind of way to mark my path, so I didn’t get lost forever once I stepped inside.
I didn’t know how long I walked, when the darkness blinded me entirely save for the faint glow of moonlight overhead.
But my calves and thighs were screaming from exhaustion. The cheap plastic foot straps scratching bloody blisters into the tops of my feet, the cold creeping into every last inch of me until no amount of movement, of rubbing my cold flesh could bring any relief, until my teeth started to chatter.
I turned backward, seeing no more than fifteen feet behind me.
No way to know where I had come from, how to get back.
My back braced against a tree, my body curling downward into itself as a long, agonized scream ripped from somewhere deep, clawing its way out, creating a giant, gaping crack inside where all the fear, all the hurt, all the uncertainty came pouring out at once. Unstoppable. Uncontrollable. Taking over every part of me.
The screams became sobs that felt like they might never end, that racked my body with their intensity.
And that was all there was.
The pain.
I was trapped in it, drowning in it, sure I would never surface again.
THREE
Ranger
I worked hard never to feel it again.
The thing that ripped me away from the world in the first place, the thing that plagued me in my dreams, but I worked hard to keep it away during the long days through hard labor, through keeping my animals alive and happy, updating the house, felling trees for next winter’s firewood, planting, weeding.
If I was tired enough, I could keep it at bay.
But as much as I told myself there was no reason to feel it, there it was regardless.
Guilt.
It welled up in my gut and spilled over the moment I pulled up to the hospital and watched her walk away.
With Miller.
A complete stranger.
I mean, not that she knew me either. But she knew me better than Miller at least.
But Miller was a woman.
I couldn’t claim to know about such things, but I imagined that – with what she was going to go through – she would prefer being with a woman, not some growling man from the woods.
I got updates from Miller as I drove back to hang with Gunn.
Inconclusive kit.
Not that it meant anything.
If she was drugged – and she was. I just had to sit with her for a few minutes to decide she wasn’t an addict. So if she was drugged, and someone had taken advantage of her, there might not have been so much trauma.
