Mother May I(71)

Then we jerked apart.

“Too much to drink,” he said, and shook himself like a bear. “You can’t drive home just yet. You’ll kill a deer or a tree or a pedestrian.”

He grabbed my hand and toted me along to the kitchen, as if I were a Thanksgiving parade balloon. I felt like one. Light and bobbing along. He made me a sandwich that was crazy good. He buttered the bread and put it facedown to toast in the same pan where he’d cooked onions and some paper-thin steaks his mom kept in the freezer. I’d described that sandwich to a dozen people over the years. Never the kiss.

I did not tell Betsy, and I knew without asking that Marshall hadn’t either. It was a moment born of alcohol and youth and his compelling sorrow. Telling would have hurt her for no reason. I’d been ashamed and sorry, but I’d learned from that moment, piling good decisions on top of it until I was no longer the girl who had kissed him. Until I was a woman who would not, in the same situation, make that same mistake.

I understood then that Trey’s story was a larger, darker version of my own. He hadn’t lied or worked hard to hide this. It was a thing of his past that had pushed him to become the man he was. It had changed him, so that it was no longer his. He’d distanced himself from Spencer in the wake of it, and from the boy he’d been. He was a better man now.

He was still looking at me, his last words hanging in the air. Not a thing you tell a woman you hope to marry.

“Okay,” I said. There was a wealth of meaning in the simple word.

He heard it. His face crumpled, and then we were in each other’s arms, and he was kissing me with such relief, such pain, such awful desperation. We fell back on the sofa, and what happened between us then was quick and rough and necessary.

My body wasn’t ready. It hurt as he came into me. He heard my gasp and tried to stop, but I would not let him. I pulled him in, legs and arms tightening around him. I wanted the urgent reconnection, and I wanted the pain, too. It was like the bite of the too-tight gold bracelet I’d shoved high on my arm before I’d gone to that ill-fated party. It was a place to hide my larger pain and be with him. I forgave him with my body and my pain, and he held me so tight, moving in me.

In this way we’d made our girls, so different from each other and yet both so clearly ours. In this way we’d made Robert. I was aware of that, every second as I rocked him, his face hidden in my shoulder. I felt his tears on my neck, and then he was shuddering into me, and even as his body shook, I regretted his vasectomy. Robert’s absence emptied out the act in such strange ways.

He turned me, turned us both, still mostly dressed, until he was on his back and I lay sideways with my head resting on his chest. He had one arm around me, my leg thrown over both of his. His free hand slid between us, touching me, precisely, correctly. This was Trey, who knew me. This was a man I knew.

He always made it good for me. For sixteen years now, Trey worked to make everything in our life good for me. Part of me was thinking, Tomorrow I may lose him. Or we could lose our boy, which will break us in a thousand ways. This might be the last time I am with him. And so I let it happen. I let him make it happen. Then I cried and cried and cried, and he held me, until the crying was more of a release than the sex had been.

In the quiet dark that followed, I listened to him breathing for a while. Then I whispered, “If Marshall can’t find Lexie—”

“He will,” Trey said.

“I have to meet her mother, whether he finds her or not. I have to go.”

“I know,” Trey said. “I’m going with you.”

“No,” I said, not sure if I meant no. We could not lose Robert. But how could we trade Trey? I should go alone. She liked me. I could beg.

“I’m going,” he repeated.

I said nothing. I was so grateful and afraid. We held each other, and I think we dozed. I did at least. I was so tired, and there was nothing we could do. Nothing but hope, and pray, and hold each other through the long darkness, waiting for Marshall to arrive with Lexie Pine. Or not.





19




Animals go to ground where they feel safe, Marshall knew, and humans were animals. It was instinct, operating underneath all the fancy curls of gray matter, down in the low parts of the brain. Home territory was so fundamental a concept, so basic, that it could trip up even the cleverest of criminals.

But there was an exception to this rule: addicts.

Addicts couldn’t go back. Once in their old haunts, they started using again. His leads would not take him anywhere that clean and sober Lexie might be found.

He had to look earlier. Thirty to fifty years earlier. He had to find her in her childhood.

Impossible. But what else did he have? He could not tuck tail, give up, slink back to Bree, and sit with her through the long hours of the night. Unendurable.

So he did his due diligence, driving to the neighborhood where Lexie’d grown up. Coral’s house, in person, looked so innocuous. Just a tidy frame ranch with a carport, like most of the others in this speck of a town crouched low between two mountains.

It was past nine-thirty, and knocking on doors this late in the country was a good way to get himself shot. He knocked anyway, starting with Coral’s old house. The new resident was a small, grumpy woman in her forties. Marshall could hear two or three other voices inside. Teenagers or older kids, squabbling.