He wanted to believe in her.
Sarah had seen something similar more times than she could count these last months. People with anxious voices and eager eyes and desperate smiles. Asking her, begging her, for answers. The difference was, those people hadn’t wanted the truth. No, they wanted answers, but only those answers that would make them feel good, or at least better, about their problems, their lives. They wanted reassurance, comfort, hope. They hadn’t been able to find it within their own belief system, whether that be religion or something else. So they had come to her.
Tell me my husband forgave me before he died.
Tell me my runaway daughter isn’t walking the streets somewhere, or lying dead in a gutter.
Tell me I’m right to choose my lover.
Tell me my mother didn’t suffer.
Tell me there’s no hell.
Tell me there is a heaven.
Tell me I have a future.
Tell me life doesn’t just end.
Tell me…please tell me…
Sarah had discovered for herself that hope was a fragile thing, difficult to hold on to in the harsh face of day-to-day living. She blamed no one for trying to hold on to it, or reach for it again after it had been lost or driven away. But she was helpless to offer hope to others when all she saw was bleak and dark and violent—and without promise.
She had expected Tucker to ask her for hope. But that wasn’t what he wanted from her. He wanted the truth. He didn’t care whether it proved to be a dark and bleak truth. He didn’t care whether it caused him pain. He just had to know the truth.
She could have given him most of what he wanted of her within the first hour of knowing him. That she had not was due to several reasons. Though he would doubtless disagree with her assessment, she knew he was not yet ready to hear the truth he needed to hear. Not yet ready to listen and understand. Proof of that had been his shocked reaction to the tiny glimpse of the truth she had shown him just after they said good night.
And then there was his part in the sequence of events that all these new instincts of hers told her had already begun. His arrival told her that the countdown had started. With his truth revealed to him, he would no doubt turn away from her, and she knew it wasn’t yet time for him to do that. There was another reason for him to be here with her. They had…some place to go together. Some place where it was cold and…bleak.
Her rendezvous with death.
And that was the final reason why she had not offered him his truth. Because he had intrigued her with his challenge. With the possibilities of what he saw. He was so sure. So sure that fate could be changed. That destiny was merely the sum of one’s choices.
Sarah needed his certainty. She didn’t want to die. There were things she hadn’t done yet, places she hadn’t seen, experiences that eluded her. She was not ready to leave life, at least not willingly. But she had no hope of her own left, no certainty that her path could be chosen by her.
All she saw was darkness.
If he was right—if there was even a small chance he was right—then Sarah needed his help to attempt to change her destiny. She needed his certainty to keep her going, his hope to replace the hope she had lost.
It was thoughts such as these that kept Sarah awake long into the night, but when she heard Margo’s buoyant voice in the other room, thoughts of her own dim future were cast aside.
Margo was home. In Richmond.
The last place on earth she needed to be today.
When Sarah came out of the bedroom to greet the other two, her first glance and tentative smile at Tucker met a somewhat guarded response. She knew why, of course. Even a brief glimpse into someone else’s soul left that soul feeling disturbingly naked.
Psychic eyes aren’t so fascinating when they’re aimed at your soul, are they, Tucker?
It hurt, though.
“Good morning,” she said, impartially to both but shifting her gaze immediately to Margo. “You didn’t have to come running back here, Margo. You shouldn’t have.”
“I was worried about you, kid. I didn’t want you to be alone.” Margo grinned suddenly, a pleased look that belied the anxiety in her expressive eyes. “Didn’t know about Tucker, obviously, or I wouldn’t have barreled back here to be a sixth wheel.”
“Third,” Sarah corrected automatically. She looked at Tucker, caught the flicker of a laugh in his green eyes, and they shared a brief moment of silent amusement.
“Oh, right, third.” As always, Margo accepted the correction amiably. “Breakfast, Sarah?”
“Just coffee.” The pot was almost empty, and Sarah used that as an excuse to make fresh. Margo made the worst coffee in creation, and repeated instructions had done nothing to change that.