After I graduated, the plan was to wait a year. Save up some money, leave together. But Corinne disappeared and all the plans went to shit. Daniel stopped working on the renovation, gave me what money he could. I left by myself—one year at a community college, then transferring to a four-year university with student housing and loans and a campus that existed unto itself, segregated from the rest of the world. Someplace safe and far away.
“Or are you sorry for changing your number?” Tyler continued, coming a step closer. “For coming home five months later like it was all nothing?”
“I can’t do this,” I said. “We were kids, Tyler. Just kids.”
“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t real,” he said, his voice softening. “We could’ve made it.”
“Could’ve. Might’ve. There’s a lot of hypothetical in that. We didn’t, Tyler. We didn’t make it.”
“Because you disappeared! Literally.”
“I didn’t disappear, I left.”
“You were there one day and then you were gone. How is that any different? Your brother had to tell me, Nic.”
“I couldn’t stay,” I said, my voice barely making it across the room.
“I know,” he said. “But it wasn’t a temporary thing. A temporary promise. I meant what I said to you.”
He let me drive his truck because his hand was all messed up. I kept touching my fingers to my face, expecting to find something new, something more substantial than a red mark and a swollen lip. “For real, Nic, are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m so done with them all. With Daniel, Corinne. I’m done with her games. I’m done with my dad. I’m done with this place.”
“Pull over,” he said.
“Where?” The streets were dark and curvy, and there wasn’t much of a shoulder, if any, in most places. But there were these outlooks over the valley—guardrails set up around tiny rectangles jutting over the rocks below.
“Anywhere.”
But I thought I knew why he wanted me to pull over, and I didn’t want to be caught in the glare of the headlights. “We’re almost to the caverns,” I said. I pulled his truck into the lot, pulled it off the road, over the lip of rocks and into the clearing, mostly hidden from view by a row of trees.
I turned off the engine. Unbuckled my seat belt. But he didn’t pull me toward him. Didn’t turn to face me at first.
“I’ll take care of you, you know that,” he said. “I’ll be good to you. I’ll love you forever, Nic.”
“I know you will,” I said. It was the one thing I was sure of.
He reached into his glove compartment and pulled out a ring. It was simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Two silver bands woven together. A line of blue gems where they interlocked.
Forever. It’s the kind of thing you say when forever has only been a handful of years. When it’s not decades before you become those Russian nesting dolls.
There was a small part of me that was still childish, stubborn in her hope, thinking I could somehow have everything. That Tyler could become Everett, that Everett could become Tyler. That I could be all the versions of me, stacked inside one another, and find someone who would want them all. But that’s childhood. Before you realize that every step is a choice. That something must be given up for something to be gained. Everything on a scale, a weighing of desires, an ordering of which you want more—and what you’d be willing to give for it.
Ten years ago, I made that choice for the both of us, ripping off a Band-Aid and taking the skin with it. A clean break, I’d thought back then. But I’d never given him that choice, never let him have any say. You disappeared, he’d said—
“I left, and I’m sorry, but that was ten years ago,” I said. “I can’t go back and undo it.”
“You keep coming back, Nic.”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant to Cooley Ridge or to him. “You’re going to be late.”
He dragged his fingers slowly and forcibly through his hair. “You make me crazy,” he said, turning for the bathroom. The shower turned on, and I could hear cabinets slamming, sense him losing his cool behind the closed door.
It happens like this—men losing themselves in moments of passion. We drive them to it. It’s not their fault.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the counter beside the refrigerator, feeling my nails digging into my palms, and slowly counted to one hundred.
* * *
WE HAD TO EXIT through the front door near the bar entrance. I kept my head down to the traffic. I followed Tyler to his truck around back, rested my head against the window as we drove.
We were silent on the ride home. He pulled into my driveway and I hesitated with my fingers on the handle, staring out the window. “Will you be okay here?” he asked.
The house. Skinny and tilted and waiting for me. Beyond that, the Carter property and the search for a missing girl. I left the car, but he lowered the passenger window. “Nic?” he said.
I took a second to look back as I walked away. He’d lost every girl he was with whenever I came home, and the ghost of me followed him everywhere in this town. Not sure why he did it—if he really thought this time would be any different. That this time I’d stay. I was breaking him over and over, every time I left, and this was something I could put an end to. A gift. A debt I owed him for everything I’d lost him.
I couldn’t come back after all. The distance only increases.
“I can’t see you anymore,” I said.
“Sure, okay,” like he didn’t believe me.
“Tyler, I’m asking you. Please. I can’t see you anymore.”
Silence as he gripped the wheel tighter.
“I’m ruining your life, Tyler. Can’t you see that?”
His silence and his stare followed me across the yard, up the porch steps, until the front door latched shut behind me.
I supposed, when he looked closely, he could see that I was.
* * *
THE HOUSE FELT DIFFERENT. Unsafe, unknown, too many possibilities existing all at once. Too many voices whispered back at me from the walls. The garage through the living room windows, so unassuming in the sunlight, and beyond, the woods stretching infinitely into the distance.
No, I would not be okay here.
I drove to the church and went down to the basement, where Officer Fraize was organizing about one tenth as many people as the day before. He gave me a map with a section bordered in orange highlighter, and he directed me toward two kids with jet-black hair picking through yesterday’s donated baked goods.
“Hi,” I said to the girl’s back.
She turned and spoke around a piece of pound cake. “Hi,” she said. She was a little older than I’d thought—younger than I was but not quite a kid anymore. “You with us?”
Us being her and a guy about the same age, two days of scruff on an otherwise unremarkable face. Siblings, I guessed from the hair color.
“Looks like it,” I said.
“I’m Britt,” she said. “This is Seth.” She looked down at the map, and I saw her roots were plain brown, several shades lighter than the rest of her hair. Maybe not siblings. “They have us following the river, looks like. Should be easy enough.”
“Let’s park at CVS,” Seth said. “I need some Advil or something.” He winced for impact.
“Hangover,” Britt whispered, feeding him a piece of cake with her fingers.
* * *
I FOLLOWED SETH’S PICKUP and waited for him to come out of the store. Besides the Advil or something, he also got some candy, and the crinkling wrappers accompanied us as we crossed the street and entered the woods. He chewed loudly until we picked up a curve of the river, and then all I could hear was the water trickling along.
I hugged the edge, keeping my gaze on the water, looking for objects that might be hidden underneath. The water wasn’t deep, and I could see the rocks and roots below, even in the shade. We reached a clearing, the sunlight bright, my eyes narrowing in response, and the glare of the sun reflected off the surface too sharply, blurring my vision.
“You okay?” Britt had her fingers curled in my sleeve just as I felt my balance start to lean.
“Yeah,” I said. “Checking to see if maybe she fell in.”
Britt pulled me farther from the edge. “Careful,” she said. “I heard they’ll get men in the water eventually, but if she’s in there”—she pointed down the bank—“it’s not like it matters how fast we find her.”