Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(77)

Neither of us does.

“I saw the photos,” he says, and I remember how he told me never to let my kids see pictures. Now I know why. It wasn’t a vague sympathy after all, and it hadn’t been about what he’d seen in Afghanistan. “I don’t suppose you can forget it, either.”

“No.” I swallow coffee, but my mouth feels dry anyway. I’ve taken the seat nearest the open window, and the buttery light illuminates him in ways that are both kind and unkind. It reveals the fine lines around his eyes, bracketing his mouth, a peculiar little indention near his left eyebrow. A pale, almost invisible spiderweb of scarring that runs from under his hairline onto his right cheek. It sparks color flecks in his eyes that make them mesmerizing. “I see her all the time. In flashes. Whenever I close my eyes, she’s there.”

“Her name was Callie,” he tells me. I already know that, but somehow it’s been so much easier to think of her as the body and the woman and the victim. Putting a name on her, hearing him say it with that mixture of sorrow and love—it hurts. “I lost track of her when we got separated in the foster system, but I found her—no, she found me. She wrote to me when I was deployed.”

“I can’t begin to understand how you feel,” I tell him. I mean it, but he hardly seems to hear me. He’s thinking about the living girl, not the dead one I remember.

“She Skyped with me when she could. She’d just started at Wichita State. No major yet, because she couldn’t decide between computer science and art, and I told her—I told her to be practical, to pick computers. I probably should have told her to do what made her happy. But you know. I thought—”

“You thought she’d have time,” I finish for him in the silence. “I can’t imagine, Sam, I’m so sorry. I’m so—” My voice, to my horror, breaks right in two, cracks on the word, and inside, I begin to shatter. I hadn’t realized I was made of glass until now, when it all gives way and the tears come, tears like nothing I’ve felt before, a tsunami of grief and rage and fury and betrayal and horror, of guilt, and I put my coffee cup aside and sob openly into my hands, as if my heart is broken along with everything else inside me.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move, except to push a roll of paper towels across the table. I grab handfuls and use them to muffle my grief, my guilt, the keening awful pain that I’ve felt at a distance for so long and never quite faced head-on.

How long we sit there, I don’t know. Long enough that the handful of paper towels is soaked with tears, and when I drop it to the wood it makes a soft, wet plop. I murmur a shaky apology and clean up after myself, carry everything away to the trash, and when I get back, Sam says, “I was stuck in country during your husband’s trial, but I followed it every day. I thought it was your fault. And then when you were acquitted . . . I thought—I thought you’d gotten away with it. I thought you helped.”

He doesn’t believe that now; I hear it in the pain in his voice. I don’t say anything. I know why he thought it; I know why everyone did. What kind of idiot did you have to be to have that going on in your house, your bed, your marriage, and not be part of it? I’m still dimly surprised anyone ever acquitted me at all. I haven’t begun to forgive Gina Royal.

So I say, “I should have known it. If I’d stopped him—”

“You’d have been dead. Your kids, too, maybe,” he says, without any sign of doubt. “I went to see him, you know. Melvin. I had to look him in the eyes. I had to know—”

That takes my breath away, the idea that he sat in that same prison chair, looking into Melvin’s face. I think about the corrosive horror Mel wakes in me. I can’t imagine how it felt for Sam.

So I reach impulsively for his hand, and he lets me take it. Our fingers lie loose together, not demanding anything except the lightest possible contact. Either his or mine are trembling slightly, but I can’t tell which. I only feel the motion.

I see something in the window behind him. It’s just a shape, a shadow, and when my brain finally identifies it as human, that no longer matters, because human isn’t as important as the thing the shape is carrying, raising, aiming.

It’s a shotgun, and it’s aimed at the back of Sam’s head.

I don’t think. I grab Sam’s hand hard and haul sideways, knocking him off-balance and down, and at the same time I throw myself down out of my own chair. I keep pulling. Sam is yanked out of his chair and sprawls halfway across the table, and then the chair spins out from under him and he falls heavily sideways on the floor just as I hear an incredibly loud boom. I dimly register the feeling of the coffee cup falling from the table and striking my thigh. It spills heat and liquid over me, warm as blood, and then a shower of glass shards hits me, and I shield my face against the cuts.

If I hadn’t seen, if I hadn’t reacted, the back of Sam’s head would have been jam. He’d have been dead in a second.

Sam’s on the ground next to me, and he lets go and rolls across the glass to crab-crawl with shocking speed to a corner, where a shotgun of his own leans, half-concealed by shadows. He grabs it on the roll, comes to a stop with his elbows braced on the floor, shotgun raised, and sights the window before he pistons his knees forward and levers up to a crouch. I don’t move. He comes slowly up, ready to dodge or drop, but he clearly sees nothing, and he quickly swivels to the front door. He’s right; that could be the next threat to appear.