Pace became breath became her body, all of her parts working together to find some meditative calm. The hangover began to recede. She let the memories wash over her.
She tested her emotions. Thought about the previous night. Chase. She tried to ignore the warm flush of excitement that coursed through her, followed by anger and regret. It was wrong, wrong to think of him and Josh at the same time. She would have to find a way to separate the two in her thoughts.
Where was Chase now?
She didn’t know anything about his life in Chicago. Did he have a woman? A house? Did he spend his Saturday afternoons mowing the yard so he could watch the game on Sunday in peace? No, he was probably combing the bars, looking for another strange woman to screw.
She pushed the pace, upped her flow.
Come on, Aubrey. You’re making pretty big assumptions. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he did enjoy your company. Face it, nothing about the last twenty-four hours was normal, by any stretch of the imagination. You’re under stress, and stress does wonky things to your mind.
Running relieved that stress and allowed her to think rationally. After a while, she was able to see there were two plausible scenarios for what happened last night.
Either she’d been used by a player on the road who had no intention of ever calling her again, or he’d actually liked her and his note stating he wanted to see her again was sincere. That was all. There were no machinations, no clandestine insights to be gained. They were just a man and a woman who’d had sex. All the weirdness in her life aside, it boiled down to that. She’d gotten paranoid. She read into everything, looked for ulterior motives, unspoken statements, danger.
And her mind had finally played the biggest trick of all on her. She’d wanted to believe he was Josh so badly, she’d almost convinced herself last night it was his arms she slept in.
Her feet pounded the pavement, and she felt more settled. The grass of Dragon Park ended, and she veered off onto Blakemore. She’d run through the Vanderbilt campus, look at all the happy kids, and pretend she was one of them. She put Tyler and Chase and Josh and Meghan and Daisy out of her mind, and let her legs take her into oblivion.
She didn’t see the dark blue sedan following her around the edges of the park.
CHAPTER 15
Aubrey was done in, her legs shaking from the exertion. She needed to go home, but she veered away from her turn. She didn’t know what possessed her to take one more lap around Dragon Park and return to the tree.
That was a lie. She knew exactly what drove her there. And though she didn’t want to indulge the demon, she did it anyway.
It had been years since they’d played the game. It was a childhood fancy, something silly. As teens it had become the most singularly romantic thing that Aubrey could ever imagine. But once they were together—dating, engaged, married—there was no reason to continue. They had instant access to each other anytime they liked. They didn’t need to arrange illicit assignations.
But after Josh went missing, the lovers’ oak called to her. It seemed fitting, since they were separated, that she resurrect their old method of communicating. When they were kids, the tree’s hidden hole had probably once been the home of a squirrel, or some birds, but when the city started spraying for mosquitoes, the tree had been vacated.
She wrote him a letter and stashed it in the oak’s trunk, in the little indentation that seemed made for their missives.
For the first year, after the media shit storm died down, after she went back to work, when she was trying to return to an even keel, she’d run to the tree every night, put her hand in the small hole, and feel for a new piece of paper. Hoping. Praying.
There never was one. The crevice was always void of anything but the pages she’d laid there.
Aubrey coped the only way she knew how. She wrote more letters. And more. But now she did it on the computer and clicked the Send button when she was finished. She’d left Josh’s email account open, hoping against hope that one day he’d see her notes and write back.
Insanity is filled with wishful thoughts.
Of course, she knew that was impossible. The blood at the house confirmed it. He’d been gravely injured the night he went missing. Injured enough that the DA tried his best to hang a murder charge on Aubrey’s slender shoulders based on the blood pool alone.