Harder (Caroline & West #2)(11)

His longing. His lust.

His need for me, his craving for my softness, his desire to claim something tender in this blighted life of his.

I can see anguish, too. Agony.

I watch agony overpower his tenderness, wrestle its way to the forefront, and shut down his expression until all the feeling left is in his lawless, angry eyes.

“Stay with Frankie,” he says. “That’s all I want from you.”

He stands and walks out of the room, like that’s a normal thing to do. Get up in the middle of everything, step over the crawling baby, stuff his plate in the garbage can and go.

Go wherever.

Go somewhere I can’t follow him.

I think about borrowing a car, asking for directions out to Bo’s place. I could park and knock on the door, find West, corner him. I could flatten my hands on his chest and shove him.

Say what you’re thinking. Admit what I mean to you.

Talk to me about what you’re going to do now that he’s dead.

Promise you’re coming back to me, convince me you love me, tell me you’re sorry.

What stops me is how badly I want him.

I want to follow him around the way Frankie follows me. Push myself up against him, seeking comfort.

What stops me, too, is what I saw. What West let me see: that he’s hurting badly, and his hardness is the only defense he’s got.

I’m here for him. Not for myself. Stay with Frankie, he said.

That’s what I do.


My third day in Silt is like the first two.

West makes himself scarce and refuses to answer my texts.

My dad calls and I ignore him. Four times. I can’t be here and still be thinking about what’s going on back home, not if I want to stay sane. It’s too much.

And I’m weary of talking to my dad. He’s obsessed with the trial. Talking to my dad about trial stuff ate my entire summer—the trial and West, West and the trial. Lying awake nights in my bedroom at the house where I grew up, I felt sometimes like I was disappearing. Like I was nothing but the aftermath of last year: what happened with Nate, what happened with West.

Instead of taking Dad’s calls, I do my detective thing in the morning, insinuating myself into conversations, learning the names of all West’s cousins, the personalities of his aunts and uncles, the simmering feuds and complicated webs of animosity that fuel this family’s daily dramas.

There are a lot of dramas. I can see why West opted out for six years.

Michelle has to go in to the police station for an interview. Joan teaches Frankie and me to play backgammon, and we have a tournament at the kitchen table while she makes chili, knits, and talks on the phone with her daughters, one after the other, each of them pissed about something.

Michelle comes home with a headache, cries when Joan asks her what the police wanted to know, and falls asleep on the couch.

Frankie gets bored and wants to play Skip-Bo. When Joan tells her she doesn’t have it, Frankie says she’s got it at the trailer. Also at the trailer are her clothes, her toiletries, her cell phone, the blanket off her bed, and everything else in the world a ten-year-old girl could possibly want.

“Can we go get it?” she asks. “Please, Caroline?”

“I don’t have a car, remember? I can ask West.”

“He’ll say no. They all say no.” She folds her arms and collapses on top of her cards in despair.

“It’s a crime scene, hon.”

But late in the afternoon, Joan takes a phone call out to the porch. When she comes back inside, she tells us the police have classified Wyatt Leavitt’s death accidental.

They’re releasing the body. The funeral will be tomorrow.

That night, after Frankie falls asleep, Joan walks up the attic steps.

“You decent?”

“Yeah.” I’m wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and yoga pants. Decent enough.

“Come with me.”

A short drive later, we’re parked in front of a dark trailer with crime-scene tape across the door.

The knob turns easily under her hand. She shows me how to duck under the tape.

Breaking and entering, I think. Contaminating a crime scene.

Technically, it’s not a crime scene anymore. But even if it were, I think I’d be here. I need to see this place. I need to know it, because this is where West came from.

This is his past.

I take it in—the musty smell, the cheap paneling over thin walls. The scratched tabletop, its wood grain a sticker half peeled away, revealing the white of the backing.

Joan comes out of the bedroom with her arms full of clothes and says, “Get me a trash bag from under the kitchen sink.”

I do as I’m told, thinking about where West would have kept his things. What he might have called his own and how he would have protected it.

He never wanted me to see this.

My cell rings. I fumble getting it out of my pocket, inadvertently accepting the call. My father’s voice says, “Caroline?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“I’ve been calling you all day.”

Joan comes out with another load of clothes. I squeeze the phone to my shoulder and hold open the trash bag. She stuffs the clothes inside.

“Sorry, I’m keeping busy.”

“Doing what?”

Trespassing.

Invading the privacy of the man I love.