I reverse my run to head home, but as I pass Sam Cade’s house, I see that he’s sitting on the front porch, drinking a cup of coffee, and against my conscious decision I slow down to look at him. He looks back, sets the coffee down, and stands up.
“Hey,” he says. It’s not much, but it’s more than I got at the range. He looks uncomfortable, a little flushed, but also determined. “So. We should probably talk.”
I stare at him for a second. I think about kicking up my run and taking off, fast and hard. Retreating. But two things that Kezia said keep echoing in my head: First, Sam Cade has alibis for the girls’ abductions. Second, I need allies.
I look down at the house. Kez’s car is still there.
“Sure,” I tell him, walking over to mount the steps of the porch. He gets a little more tense, and so do I, and for a second there’s silence as deep as back in the shooting range. “So. Talk.”
He looks down at his coffee cup, and from where I stand I can see it’s empty. He shrugs, throws open the front door of the cabin, and walks inside.
I pause on the doorstep for one second, two, and then follow.
It’s dark inside, and I have to blink a couple of times as he turns on some dim overheads and skims back one of the checkered curtains covering the windows. He goes straight to a coffeepot, fills his cup, takes down another, and splashes it full. He hands it to me, along with the sugar, without a word.
It should feel comfortable, but it feels like effort, like a steel bar between us that we’re struggling to get around. I sip the coffee and remember that he likes hazelnut blend. So do I. “Thanks,” I say.
“You smell like gunpowder,” he tells me. “Been up shooting at the range?”
“Until they tell me I can’t, I will,” I say. “Cops let you go, then.”
“Seems like.” He studies me over the top of the cup, cautious, dark eyes guarded. “You too.”
“Because I’m not fucking guilty, Sam.”
“Yeah.” He drinks. “So you said. Gwen.”
I nearly throw the coffee in his face for that, but I manage not to, mainly because I know it would only get me arrested for assault, and besides, it’s not hot enough to scald. Then I wonder why I’m so damn angry. He has the right to hate me. I don’t have the right to hate him back. I can resent his deception, sure, but in the end, there’s only one of us with a real grudge. Real pain.
I sink down in a chair, suddenly very tired, and am only aware of drinking the coffee in a peripheral sense kind of way. I’m consumed with watching him, with wondering, suddenly, who he really is. Who I really am. How we can possibly rebuild any kind of ease between us.
“Why did you come here?” I ask him. “The truth this time.”
Sam doesn’t vary his focus at all. “I wasn’t lying. I’m writing a book. It’s about my sister’s murder. Yeah, I tracked you down. It took a friend in military intelligence to do it, and by the way, he was very impressed with how you kept disappearing. I missed you four times in a row. I took a chance you’d stay here, since you bought the place this time.”
So. The stalking isn’t in my imagination. Not at all. “That’s how. Not why.”
“I wanted you to confess what you did,” he says. He blinks, as if he’s surprised he said it out loud. “It was all I thought about. I’d built you up into . . . Look, I believed you were part of it. Knew everything. I thought you—”
“Were guilty,” I finish for him. “You’re hardly alone. You’re not even in the minority.” I swallow some coffee without tasting it. “I don’t blame you for that. I don’t. In your position, I’d have—” I’d have done anything to get justice.
I’d have killed me.
“Yeah.” He draws that out into a sigh. “Problem is, once I met you, talked to you, got to know you . . . I couldn’t see it. I saw somebody who barely survived what she’d gone through and just wanted to keep her family safe. You just weren’t . . . her.”
“Gina wasn’t guilty, either,” I tell him. “She was just naive. And she wanted to be happy. He knew how to take advantage of that.” Silence falls. I find myself breaking it by saying, “I saw your sister. She was—she was the last one. I saw her the day the car crashed into the garage.”
Sam freezes, holds for just a bare second, then smoothly puts down his coffee. The mug hits the table surface a little hard. There’s a matte, polished expanse of wood between us, not an invisible barrier, and maybe that’s better. I could reach across it. So could he.
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—”