Page 10 of Traces Of You

“Talk to me, Reenie. We used to mean something to each other. I’ve thought of you for years. What happened to you. Where you landed. How you’ve been. And now, you’re just here crossing through? I don’t get it.”

She wasn’t from New York originally. He’d gotten that much out of her.

Her mother was Canadian and she’d moved around a lot in Vermont and upper New York by the time she landed in Warrensburg for that one year.

It took him months to find that out.

“I’m running behind and have to get on the road,” she said.

“You’re scared,” he said. “I can see it, there is no denying it. I can help. You wouldn’t let me do it before, but I can now.Letme help you.”

A tear rolled down her cheek. “I don’t think you can. I need to help myself first. I’m doing that now.”

He drew in a slow breath. As proud as he was to see her finally standing up for herself, being told to stand down again settled in his gut like a stone.

“Let me be the judge of what I can and can’t do.”

She was shaking her head. “It’s better if I just leave.”

“Better for who? You? Not if you’ve got to be on the run the whole time.”

She’d packed lightly. Although the car was old, it appeared newly purchased. Shit, he was shocked that the car had made it from Florida, since it was easily fifteen years old.

“I won’t be once I get where I need to go,” she said.

He frowned. She was going to the border.

He hated to think she was running from the law and he couldn’t let her out of his sight if that was the case.

“We can play this two ways,” he said. “You can open up and talk to me or I can run your plates and license. It will come up with who the car is registered to.”

“It’s mine,” she said.

“Maureen Dupree?” he asked.

“Yes. But please don’t do it. Please.”

The same desperation he’d seen twenty years ago. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

“Not like you think. I did nothing wrong. But I still need to leave.”

She wasn’t sobbing, but another tear escaped down her cheek. Her hands were shaking, her shoulders too.

It was chilly out, but he didn’t think the cold breeze was causing any of it.

“Does anyone know where you are? Your mother or anyone else?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t talked to my mother in years. I’m not sure where she lives anymore.”

That didn’t surprise him from what he’d picked up on about Reenie’s childhood. Not that he’d ever been to her apartment when they were friends.

And friends were all they got to be. He might have wanted more and even got one kiss out of her before she left, but nothing else. Nothing deeper, nothing memorable to her, it seemed.

He cherished their friendship and kept everyone away from her that year.

The months it’d taken her to open up felt like a decade. Every time he got one inch in the door, something happened that she’d never tell him about, and it’d be slammed shut again.

He had his suspicions though never voiced them.