Page 36

“Gimme.” I reached my hand out toward Wes and wiggled my fingers, and he placed a chocolate-chip cookie in my palm. That didn’t

stop my finger-wiggling, so he gave me another, and I pulled my hand back, satisfied. For the moment anyway.

“Jo’s going to kill us,” Wes said, his mouth full of cookie. His fifth, at least.

I sat across from him on the dining room floor, my legs crossed under me.

(Quick sidebar: How are we, as mature, well-meaning, socially responsible adults, supposed to refer to that style of sitting nowadays?

Obviously, we should never use the culturally insensitive colloquialism of our ignorant youth.

And not to sound uppity, but as a retired US Air Force first lieutenant with a master’s from AFIT, I feel that “crisscross applesauce,” frankly, is somewhat beneath me.

If anyone has the answer, please let me know.) He set down the increasingly sparse platter of cookies, which Jo had probably intended to (a) share with more than two people and (b) last more than one sitting, and reclined back onto his elbows.

His white shirt, originally so “ready for a day on the campaign trail,” now screamed “my drunk wife and I just got into an altercation in a Tennessee Williams play,” with its partially untucked front and plethora of creases and mascara stains and one broken button in the middle.

“Kill me , maybe. You, on the other hand, can do no wrong in Jo’s eyes.”

Wes had always been her favorite. Oh, sure, like all great educators—a category in which I unequivocally included Mrs. Stoddard—I

knew she would deny having a favorite student. At least she would deny it to me and her other nonfavorite former students.

But I knew it. We all knew it, back in the day. And while each of my friends handled that a little differently (Cole teased

Wes relentlessly, Brynn continually attempted to dethrone him and attain the crown for herself, and Laila was just wholly

unaffected by it all), I was always glad that was the case. It was always worth celebrating, I thought, when someone else

acknowledged the remarkable person he was and recognized all he had to offer.

He’d certainly had a difficult time recognizing any of that within himself.

“I feel like I should tell you something.” He scooted back a touch to rest his head up against the wall, but he stayed in

his reclined position. “I’ve been in touch with Jo for a while. I mean, not a superlong while. Just since a little after my

father died.”

“I figured,” I told him with a shrug. And maybe I hadn’t actually gotten quite to the point of figuring yet, but I certainly wasn’t surprised to hear it. “It makes sense that you’d want some Adelaide Springs intel before coming

back here.”

“No.” He shook his head and sat up fully. “No, it wasn’t about that at all. Honestly... honestly it was just about me,

Addie.” He looked down at his shirt, spotted a chocolate-chip smudge, and began to raise his hand to try to wipe it off. But

before his hand even reached his shirt, he seemed to decide it was pointless. That shirt was probably a lost cause. He lowered

his hand back to the dining room hardwood floor and scooted back against the wall instead. He sighed and looked up from his

hopeless shirt to meet my eyes. “After Wray died, and then even more after my father died, I just really started wanting to

come home.”

Home.

“How can you still view this place as home?”

His pupils dilated in response to my question, and I couldn’t help but wonder which emotion was causing the physiological

response. It had always been fascinating to me, watching surveillance footage and zeroing in on a target’s eyes. No matter

how skilled and practiced the target, very rarely did I come across one whose pupils didn’t react in some sort of indicative

way. Oh, sure, that could mean so many different things—fear, anxiety, lies, arousal. You might be surprised to learn how

often all of those inciters were simultaneously present at the height of danger for some people, and how in the particularly

savvy (and, usually, evil), it was often impossible to sort them all out.

But I didn’t get the impression Wes was making any strong attempts to be savvy at that moment. And by that point I was pretty

convinced he wasn’t truly evil. I was also fairly easily able to eliminate arousal from the mix at that particular moment.

If he was the husband in the Tennessee Williams play, I was the drunk wife who had once been the cutest little lady in the

whole county but who now resembled Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction , somewhere between boiling the rabbit and being drowned by Michael Douglas.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

I tried to think about that for a minute—to give it the consideration it deserved—but the answer was so obvious that I couldn’t

even pretend to be unsure. “No. I don’t.” Adelaide Springs had stopped being home a long time ago.

Wes’s dilated eyes— sadness —stayed locked with mine as he reached out to the plate and grabbed another cookie. But he didn’t eat this one right away.

Instead, he just spun it mindlessly through his fingers. “Is that because of me?”

My initial urge was to shut it down. Again.

I didn’t want to talk about our past—although it wasn’t our past that was the issue, I was pretty sure, so much as the part of my past that was caused by him.

But then, really, wasn’t it all caused by him?

Or at least influenced by him? The lost years, yes, and the pain that I had been so certain was never going to relent, but also the years that came after the pain.

Joel . And if there was only one thing I knew with complete certainty, it was that I wouldn’t have traded my years with Joel. I

would have given just about anything to avoid the pain of losing my husband. Anything other than never having found him in

the first place.

“Partially, I guess,” I answered him, feeling a little bit like a new fawn, testing out my legs, not quite certain they’d

hold me. But Wes had given me the gift of the past hour or so. He’d given me the gift of understanding and empathy and a non-government-redacted

moment of grief. If he needed to confront this—if he needed to confront us —it suddenly seemed like the least I could do. “If I’m being honest, I was pretty sure, for a long time, that I never wanted

to show my face here ever again. I couldn’t imagine facing the memories. And honestly, it was just weird being here without

you.”

He nodded and looked down at the cookie in his hands. “I get that. It was weird being, well, anywhere without you too.”

Give him this. It wasn’t really my brain telling me to give him the shot at catharsis or closure or reconciliation or whatever it was he

was chasing. My brain—logic, analysis, data—was my guiding force and had been for so long. But this was more like a voice

from deep inside. Or rather, it was my brain, but my brain was telling me it was okay to allow my heart a seat at the table this time.

I didn’t owe him anything. I mean, I owed him gratitude for the events of the dining room, there at the Inn Between, and I

felt no qualms about giving him that. Beyond that? I owed him nothing. But even if my brain was still struggling to draw a

line to connect all the dots of Wes Hobbes—my first love, the guy who’d disappeared, a polished politician so unlike the person

I had known, and possibly a middle-aged man in the throes of a midlife crisis—my heart was beginning to see him for what he

was. Somewhere under all the other stuff—because of it... despite it—he was still Wes.

I cleared my throat as I pushed myself up and grabbed onto the dining table for support when I realized my feet had begun falling asleep.

I wiggled my toes in my sneakers and then slid them off and gently kicked them against the wall when they suddenly felt too constricting.

I stretched my arms over my head and then brushed cookie crumbs off my sweater.

(Note to self: sweep before Jo gets back.) Then I walked over to his side of the wall.

I didn’t have to say “Scoot” this time. He looked up at me and set the cookie

in his hands down on a napkin beside him, then pushed the plate of cookies in front of the china hutch and scooted over in

the same direction, making room for me along the wall.

I slid down next to him and, as we both stared straight ahead, asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

He nodded slowly. “I do. And I also very much don’t.”

“Well, then, we’re halfway in agreement. But let’s do it anyway.”

He propped up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. “Can I just... I mean, first of all, before I say anything, can

I just issue one disclaimer?”

“Sure.”

“I just... I need you to know that there is nothing left in me— nothing —that believes I did the right thing by leaving. I wasn’t even sure then, really, and then I guess I sort of convinced myself

somewhere along the line. But now?” He shook his head. “ Nothing. So any sort of anything that sounds like I’m trying to justify... I’m not. I’m just explaining where I was at the time. I need you to know that.”

“Got it.” I found myself counting slowly down from ten, trying to prepare myself for whatever he was about to say. Reminding

myself it didn’t matter now. Repeating the thoughts from a few minutes prior, though with a slightly different spin. If Wes hadn’t left, I never would have met Joel. If the pain of losing Wes was necessary in order to find Joel, I wouldn’t give it up for anything. “So tell me. What happened?”

He leaned forward and rested his chin on his knees. “The governor. He, um—”

“I’m sorry. Who?”

“My father. Governor McNeese.”

“You call him ‘the governor’?”