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“It’s just me.” She tried not to hear the hollow sadness of this. She slid under the bedcovers, still warm from Danny’s body.
“Are you ... do you want to stay?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” There was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? She just hoped he wouldn’t question this tonight.Just this once,she thought fervently,don’t be a Boy Scout.
He stretched out beside her, still hesitant, not touching her. “Listen. I need to talk about—”
She cut him off, redirecting his hand to her chest. “Not now, Danny. Please.”
Danny sucked in a quick breath, and she dipped her head to kiss the side of his neck, her mouth on his throat as she threaded one long leg between his. She wouldn’t think about the search. She wouldn’t think about Jessica or ... Silas. She felt Danny respond, but a moment later, he’d untangled himself from her.
“What’s wrong?”
He looked wretched, really, now that she looked closer. Haunted but also hardened, somehow. Not the Danny she’d known for so many years. She swallowed a new swell of guilt. This had to have been so hard on him, Danny the public servant in the making. Had she, so caught up in her own tangled story, just not noticed what this search was doing to him?
He regarded her at arm’s length. “Are you sure you want this? Do you really want to be with me?”
He looked almost ... distrusting, and she felt herself flush. “Why wouldn’t I want to be?”
His jaw clenched, and when he offered an apologetic smile it didn’t reach his eyes. They remained trained on Meg in the dark. She reached for him, but he deflected the caress.
“It’s just ... this isn’t how I wanted this to happen.”
“What?”
He pinched his eyes closed with his fingers. “Any of this.” But his body, still pressed against hers, said otherwise.
“There’s no point in waiting forever,” she told him. The commitment her mother warned her against had never looked so good. “I think we need this right now.” Something about this argument, weak as it was, spoke to something within him. He cupped her face in his hands and nodded, at first hesitantly and then with more conviction.
“Yes, it’s you and me, right? Just you and me.Weare who we need right now.”
She didn’t answer him. Just resumed where she had left off, her leg wrapped around his hip once more, her face back in the hollow ofhis throat. She pushed up Danny’s shirt, kissing his chest, all the while willing her own tears not to fall. She couldn’t let them wet his skin and expose her.
He rolled her from her side to her back, his hands fumbling with the button of her pants, and she let him, willing herself to believe that as restitution went, this just might work.
30
SILAS
Matheson search
November 21, 2018
10:45 a.m.
Marble Lake Wilderness
All Silas wants to do is curl into the prone form of his son and lose himself. Seeing Cameron in the light of the headlamp feels different from seeing Spencer carried out from the pond. Everything about Spencer’s condition felt reversible, the whole universe on fast-forward, trying to beat the clock. Everything in this mine shaft feels carved in cold, hard stone, from the unnatural bend in Cameron’s knees to the rigidity of his skin. He presses Cameron’s body directly to his torso, rocking him up and down as the cold from his son’s body seeps in, clinging to him. If Silas can just hide here for a moment, burying his face into the wet cotton of Cameron’s sweatshirt, he’ll be ready when time sweeps forward again, carrying him with it.
From far away, Meg pleads with him. “Silas! Lay him down.”
She falls to her knees beside him, trying to wedge herself between him and Cameron. Her fingers curl around Silas’s bicep.
“Silas! Please!”
He looks down at her fingers gripping his jacket, ghostly white in the beam of the headlamp. They’re just as far away as her voice, as if he’s looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
“No! Just let me be with him!” He doesn’t mean to yell. He just ... has to.
