“Yes, but I don’t mean to compare our experiences. It’s just that I understand your fear that if you found Charlie, you would have to explain why you weren’t in his life—” She broke off, shrugging slightly.
“But unlike me, you aren’t to blame, Lily. You rode up to the convenience store on the back of Jesse’s bike, thinking he was going to buy beer and cigarettes. You didn’t know he was armed when he went into the store.”
It was true. She’d had no idea when Jesse warned her not to follow him that he had the .357 he carried in his saddlebag shoved in the waistband of his jeans. It had been concealed by his jacket. She hadn’t been paying attention, anyway. She’d been too excited. He’d taught her to drive the Harley, and he’d promised she could drive it when he got back. She’d scooched up on the seat, fingered the keys, used her hands to twist the handlebars, pretending to gun the engine. When she’d heard the cracking noises and looked around, she’d thought a car on the highway backfired. She ought to have known better. She’d grown up on a ranch and shot plenty of guns. “The kid Jesse killed was younger than me,” she said softly. “Only seventeen.”
The remembrance of that day was vivid now, making Lily shake. She could smell the tarred surface of the parking lot, warmed by the sun. She heard the shots, three in quick succession—bam, bam, bam. Jesse’s sudden weight on the seat of the Harley behind her had almost unbalanced her. “Go! Go! Go!” He had shouted it in her ear.
“It’s all right,” Edward said.
She felt him scoot in beside her, felt his breath stir her hair. When his arm came around her and he pulled her close, she went still. The whole length of his leg—hip, thigh, calf—pressed against hers. She felt the swell of his breath. She wanted to look at him, to see what was in his eyes, but she was afraid if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from kissing him, from crushing herself against him.
As if he read her mind, Edward turned her face to his. He locked her gaze, and she felt his thumb trace the contour of her lower lip. His fingertips brushed a slow path down the length of her neck, coming to rest in the hollow of her throat, where her pulse was beating as rapidly as the heart of a small bird. The moment held, shimmering, electric.
He looked away first, and she felt almost sick with disappointment. A sound broke softly from his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That crossed a line.”
“No,” she murmured. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I wish things were different.”
“Yes. I do, too.” He’s leaving. The thought surfaced in her brain. Lily wondered how she would stand it. She wondered how she could be so consumed with longing for Edward when her son was missing. “I think, sometimes, if the police hadn’t caught us, I might have become a criminal. Maybe I have that kind of mind.” She revealed another of her secrets, one that haunted her.
Edward looked sidelong at her.
“I was so scared, going to jail. But I deserved it. I did what they said. I was there when Jesse robbed that store and shot that boy. The fact that I didn’t know what he planned is no excuse.”
“You’re assuming too much responsibility, and that’s my legal opinion. If you’re guilty of anything, it’s bad judgment, like ninety-nine percent of the rest of the population.”
She toyed with her spoon.
“I know the charges against you were dropped, but you never said how.”
“When Dad came to Phoenix, he brought Paul with him. They’d done business together, been friends a number of years. He knew Paul was from Arizona and had connections there. Favors were called in, and I was released.” Lily felt a wave of old bitterness. She hadn’t wanted anyone’s favors. “I was back home in Texas within a month. Jesse died in prison a year and a half later in a knife fight with another inmate.”
“And you married Paul.”
“That was the price of my freedom,” Lily said.
“Are you saying you felt obligated to marry him?” Incomprehension lightened Edward’s voice.
“Dad and I both felt we owed him, but the way the marriage came about was more subtle than that.”
Edward bent his elbow on the table and leaned his head on his hand, looking at her, still incredulous.
“Do you remember when you got the charges dropped against AJ, and Paul gave him the ultimatum about joining the military?”
“Your dad told you to marry Paul? Or what? He’d kick you out?”
“Not in so many words, no. I could have enrolled at A&M. But the idea of being on a college campus with all those kids—I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I didn’t feel much of anything, really. I was depressed, I guess. Angry at myself and Dad. Paul came around a lot then. We’d go riding. He didn’t enjoy it; he wasn’t good at it, but he went as a favor to me, because it was the one place I felt safe, on the back of a horse. After a while, he asked Dad if it would be all right if he pursued a romantic relationship with me.”
“That sounds so—old-school. You were okay with it? What was he, forty when you married?”
“Almost forty-two. I was nineteen.” Lily extended her arms, picking absently at her thumbnail. “I was really scared of what I’d done. I didn’t trust myself. Paul was settled. He had a good life, one I could walk into.” Hide out in. She had wanted that, too. She had wanted to be different, to become someone else. Better, smarter. Instead, she had become more afraid. She was subject to anxiety. She kept to herself, to her home. Her gynecologist had once suggested she might be mildly agoraphobic.
“So your dad okayed it.” Edward’s voice still carried an echo of disbelief. “I mean, it sounds as if, like AJ, you were given an ultimatum.”
“Dad would be angry to hear it called that.” Lily remembered waking in a panic on the morning of her wedding. She remembered sitting on her bed, rocking herself, terrified of the promise she’d made to marry Paul, knowing she didn’t love him, wondering if the gratitude she did feel toward him was enough. Winona had sat beside her, and while Lily’s tears had speckled her bare thighs, Win had taken her hand and smoothed her hair. When Win had found out about the marriage, she’d argued with Lily’s dad, declaring Lily too young to make such a commitment, but he had been unmoved.
“I didn’t think—I mean, happiness—” Lily stammered in her attempt to capture it, the state of her mind at the time. “It wasn’t something—being happy wasn’t a consideration. Paul needed a wife, one he could—” Groom. She almost said it, and while she believed that had been Paul’s intention—part of it, anyway—she couldn’t go that far with her disloyalty. “He was kind to me in the beginning,” she finished lamely.
Edward said nothing, and they sat for several moments, not looking at each other. What were they doing here? What did she want to happen? Lily imagined Edward wondered, too.
“We’re all fallible,” he said. “But the price for our mistakes shouldn’t be our happiness.”
“I regret not being honest with my son. What if it could have made a difference?”