Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(82)

He couldn’t continue to blame it all on the drugs, telling himself she’d make an about-face when it was all behind her. He couldn’t even continue to blame it on her past. After all these months of kicking himself for not having told his mother where Carrie came from, because it might have made a difference, he acknowledged that cutting her extra slack because of it might not have been the healthiest thing to do. It wasn’t for him.

Back when Carrie first told him, bizarre and unexpected as the revelation was, he found it to be a relief. It explained so much about her—though not everything.

He was, of course, incredulous, thinking it had to be a joke.

The witness protection program? Seriously?

But of course she was dead serious. Carrie wasn’t the kind of woman who kidded around—another trait he’d grown to resent over the years. He came from a family of mischievous imps who enjoyed their practical jokes almost as much as they enjoyed socializing and drinking beer—and that included his mother.

Carrie’s family, due to circumstances alone, couldn’t have been more opposite. He never did get all the details about what led up to their extraordinary vanishing act. She didn’t know—or so she said.

It had all unfolded when she was young, she said, too young to remember much other than being a little girl living with her parents in a city—she didn’t know which city, she said, or even which part of the country.

“Didn’t your parents ever fill you in?” Mack asked. “Later, I mean.”

She shrugged. “No.”

“You mean they refused to tell you?”

“I mean, I never asked. What did it matter? All I knew is that I had a normal life, and then one day, I didn’t.”

Carrie didn’t know what had happened, exactly, to land her family in that position, but it involved her father. She told Mack she didn’t know whether he was involved in criminal activity himself, or had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps witnessed something he shouldn’t have.

Mack had a hard time buying that she didn’t know—maybe even on some subconscious level—whether her father was a good guy, or . . . well, a wiseguy.

Carrie claimed it didn’t matter to her. He had a hard time buying that, too.

She said that she loved her father until the day he died, and forgave him for the way things had turned out. That, Mack believed.

“We never lived a normal life,” she told Mack. “Even after we were settled into our new life, we had to pick up and move again, without any warning.”

“Why?”

“They were getting too close, I guess. That happened a few times. It was hard on my mother. My parents fought all the time. But they couldn’t separate.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure. I just know they always talked about how they were stuck with each other. I guess a separation would have meant one of them would have to leave and never see me again. So they stayed together.”

It made as much sense, Mack supposed, as any of the rest of it did. Her parents had chosen to put their love for their child before their own marital needs.

And Mack had chosen, on Tuesday morning, to put a child who doesn’t yet exist—a child who may never exist—before his own marriage.

When he told Carrie it was over, he didn’t give her the option to change her mind about having a baby. He didn’t want that.

He simply wanted out. He’d had enough. He didn’t want to live in isolation anymore with a woman who needed only him, and needed him desperately.

People don’t change. That was what he told her—not that she’d offered to change. But he said it anyway; told her that she couldn’t change who she was any more than he could change what he wanted out of life.

She didn’t argue, didn’t cry, didn’t even speak. She simply left.

He has no way of knowing what was going through her head as she went to work that last morning; no way of knowing whether, had the day unfolded in an ordinary way, she’d have come home that night wanting to talk things out with him, wanting a second chance.

But even now, he knows it would have been futile for her to ask for one. If he had to do it all again, he would make the same decision.

Maybe he’d already made it, subconsciously, even before she told him on Monday evening that she couldn’t go forward with the infertility treatments.

That was why he’d come home late from work. Not because he’d stopped for a beer with Ben, as he’d told Carrie. Ben hadn’t gone for drinks after work in years, not socially, anyway. Unless he had a business engagement to attend he was always too eager to get right home to Randi and Lexi.

That night, like countless others, Mack had stuck around the office playing computer solitaire long after his work was finished and everyone else had gone home. Unlike his colleagues, he wasn’t eager to be reunited with his spouse at the end of a long, hard day. He dreaded it.

Well, you’ll never have to deal with that again, will you? It’s over.

Cloaked in guilt, he walks on, thinking about Carrie, and about loss. Not about his own, because it was a loss he’d already accepted, a loss he’d chosen.

But Carrie—her loss that morning was monumental. She’d gone to her grave knowing he was going to leave.

You can’t blame yourself for her death. You didn’t kill her.