At about eleven o’clock the next day, as the mail truck trundled back down the road, Mac practically punched his hand into his mailbox. He swirled his hand around.

Nothing. Not even dust. Not even a spider.

He closed his eyes and swore softly. How much of this angst could have been avoided if Mike had just paid him back on time?

When he opened his eyes, Avalon was about ten feet away, heading toward the mailbox.

“How’d the visit with Corncob go? You kids patch things up?”

She stopped a good five feet back from him. As if she’d seen a dark object off in the distance, and she wasn’t certain whether he was a tree trunk or a bear.

She said nothing. Her hair was gathered up in a straggly ponytail and there were purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her face was pale but her mood was palpably dark.

Clearly she hadn’t slept any more than he had. And despite himself the idea that she was feeling wretched made him restless.

She clearly wasn’t glowing from a happy reunion, that was for sure. He knew a little unworthy thrill of pleasure at that.

“So did he leave?” He was conscious of pressing his luck but unable to help himself somehow. “You can’t hear a Prius leave. Sneaky little car for a sneaky little man.”

Before his eyes, her expression slowly evolved into one of black, incredulous amazement. It was like watching a time lapse of a bad, bad storm moving in.

She approached him, slowly. Slowly.

Very like she was stalking him.

She stopped at a distance he couldn’t reach across without moving toward her. “At least he actually came looking for me,” she said. With such wounded, resigned bitterness he blinked.

“What the . . . what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

She seemed to weigh whether to answer the question. “It means, Mac, that if I hadn’t shown up here at Devil’s Leap more than a decade after you last saw me, apparently you were perfectly okay with never seeing me again. And I’m pretty sure if I left today, the same thing would be true.”

“What the—you disappeared on me, Avalon!”

He’d never said the words aloud to anyone in his life.

When he said them, he knew they summed up that core of pain lodged inside him. It had never budged, never shrunk. He’d only been able to armor it. He’d never said them because they were his biggest weakness.

“Of course I disappeared!” Pain all but howled through those words.

He didn’t think he’d ever known dread quite like this. Or maybe relief was a better word. It was whatever the guy facing a firing squad felt the second the triggers were pulled.

He had an epiphany then: He’d thought he was free before. And now he knew he wouldn’t truly be free until she said what she was about to say.

“So you did have a reason. For disappearing.”

The silence between them was seconds long, but miles dense.

“You remember that day . . . up in your parents’ room?” she said finally.

“It’s etched on my soul,” he could have said. “It’s the ‘before’ and ‘after’ dividing line of my life.” He just nodded.

“I ran into your dad when I went downstairs. He was surprised to see me, too. I had to say something, so I told him I was looking for the bathroom. He gave me directions to it. Then the phone rang in the kitchen. You came down to take the call. And then . . .”

“You eavesdropped,” he said with flat incredulity.

“. . . Do you remember what you said?”

His hands iced as the blood fled the surface of his skin. Disgusted with the boy he once was. Because he did remember.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t get the words out.

“You basically said . . .” She drew in a long breath. “. . . you said, ‘Avalon? Are you kidding me? Nah. She’s just a hick from the sticks. Not Harvard material.’”

Yep. Just as horrible as he remembered. He made a pained sound. “And then you left without saying a damn thing to me and I never saw you again.”

“What would you do, Mac?”

“I would have tracked you down and made you explain what you meant by that phone call, for fuck’s sake.”

“Bullshit! You never looked for me!”

“You were never anywhere I looked! You were never with your brothers and they would have given me merciless amounts of shit if I asked about you more than once. I . . . I just figured . . .”

“What did you figure?”

He recited it flatly, as if delivering it in a monotone could remove all the pain from it. “That maybe you saw something so irredeemable in me that you had to get the fuck away as fast as possible. Or maybe . . . maybe you’d just gotten bored. That all I was was a way to get through a summer.”

He saw the words penetrate; she softened. Her fundamental kindness was warring with a righteousness she was wholly entitled to. She didn’t speak.

“You weren’t afraid of a damn thing back then, Avalon. I’m surprised you didn’t just go right up to me and deck me.”

She whipped a stray hair out of her eyes. “Here’s why,” she said quietly. “I was shocked clean through. I thought you despised me. And I was ashamed that someone I cared about so much could think those things about me when I’d always thought the opposite was true. It entirely changed my view of myself and the world. It was the first time that I considered myself in that light . . . as somehow not good enough for someone. And hearing those words coming from you . . .”

He understood. And he really had no defense. Just pity and contempt for the boy he’d been. And an ache for the girl she’d been.

“I wish you hadn’t heard them,” he said wearily.

“Why did you say those things?”

He blew out a breath. “Because I probably meant them. That’s how fucked-up I was back then.”

Her expression . . . it was like he’d taken a shovel to her knees. “What?” Her voice was hoarse.

“Or thought I should mean them. I was told repeatedly that that was what you were and that was how I should feel. By my dad.”

All the color had drained from her face. He could see her freckles starkly. Thirteen.

He took a step toward her, as if he could feel her pulling away. “I am bad at this, Avalon, so please . . . I’m going to try to explain. All my life, up until I was about eighteen, all I ever wanted to do was make my dad proud. I worshipped that man like he was a god. Everyone treated him like one, I thought—well, he must be a god, right? I thought everything he said was true and everything he told me was gospel. I wanted to be just like him and that’s what he wanted, too. Didn’t you feel the same way about your parents when you were a kid?”

It was clear she didn’t want to concede any point or yield any understanding to him right now. But it would have been completely counter to her nature to lie. “Sure. Yes. I guess.”

“And you can believe me or not, and you’re not going to like hearing this: I was repeating things I knew he wanted to hear, because he was standing right there. I repeated them to a girl he wanted me to impress, because her dad was rich. And he did think you were a hick from the sticks who just wanted to get knocked up and get your hands on my money. And every single time he said something like that—and he said shit like that, horrible ugly things, so often and so blithely—I died a little inside. Because there was this . . . chasm between what I was told was true and what I knew was true about you. So I figured there must be something wrong with me for feeling the way I felt about you.”

And now Mac was breathing as though he was waiting for someone to come along and help him pull a knife out of his gut. Ragged gulps of air.

Her eyes flared with a surge of compassion; he could see it move through her, in the drop of her shoulders; he could feel it as tangibly as a change in weather.

But she stood her ground. And he knew what the next question would be.

“How did you feel, Mac?” Her voice was quiet and even.

“I thought you were . . . beautiful. And . . . magical. And . . . and the world only felt right when I was with you.”

She went still.

He’d hoped it was enough. But the corner of her mouth twisted; a faint cynicism darkened her gaze, as if he’d only just fulfilled her expectations.

“You know . . . those words . . . they blew my whole life off course. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life proving I wasn’t what you said I was. No matter what, I would never have said those things.”

“How . . . the hell do you know that?” A surge of frustrated fury sent the words out cracked. “The thing I don’t think you realize, Avalon . . . is what a luxury it was to be allowed to be yourself your whole life. To just be, without someone dictating who they think you ought to be, without being forced to live up to what began as an impossible ideal that ended as a giant lie. I had to figure everything out from nothing. From wreckage. I made sure I did it scrupulously, one step at a time. I made sure I was straight with everyone. I never cut a corner, and I never did anyone dirty. And now I know who I am. And I just now told you the truth. Which you asked for. And apparently you don’t like it. I’m sorry I hurt you, but I don’t ever want to lie to you.”

Her jaw got tauter and tauter as she listened to this.

“Okay. Fine, Mac,” she said evenly, ironically. “I get it. But the problem is . . . you think cutting everyone and everything out of your life means you’re tough. But I think all it really means is you’re scared. Scared of loose ends, scared of complications, scared to be disappointed, scared to be hurt. And who could possibly compete with your true love? Fear.”

“Guess it takes a coward to know one, huh?” he shot back.

There was a shocked little silence.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” It was practically a hiss.

“It means that I hurt you one time—and believe me, a lot of people go through life collecting hurt—and the rest of your disappointments or that twit Corncob or your other near misses are my fault? Much easier to blame me than yourself, I guess.”

She reared back a little. Blinking in amazement. She stared at him for a second or two of assessing stillness.

And then the fight left her posture, like air slowly seeping from a balloon.

“You’re right,” she said, almost wonderingly. She gave a short, self-deprecating little laugh. “I am scared.” It had the ring of finality about it.

“Avalon . . .” He took a desperate step forward. Her eyes gleamed with tears.

She shook her head implacably and stepped backward. “I’m heading to San Francisco this afternoon. Turns out Corbin made a hash of things and to make a long story short we now need an injection of cash to even meet rent and payroll by the end of the month. So I have a meeting with the potential buyer for the house while in the city. And all this means: you probably have about two days to offer me, in cash, what this house is now worth.”

Too many emotions at once bludgeoned him into silence.

“I’ll be back to wrap things up here by the weekend,” she added. “And then that’s it. I’ve decided I’ll be going back to San Francisco after that. I think whatever I came here to do is done. But . . . thanks for everything, Mac.”

She leaned forward then and punched him chummily in the shoulder.

And then turned around and took off at a jog.

He stalked back toward his cottage, his breath sawing as if he’d just been in an actual physical wrestling match.

He teetered like a drunk and sat down hard on the Adirondack chair in front of his house.

Then he bent his hands over his head like they tell you to do when the plane is heading into a nosedive. Won’t help much if it’s determined to crash, of course. It was really just a formality, in that case.

Kind of felt like a formality right now, given that the crash had taken place.

He breathed in and out.

The anger was bitter and caustic in the back of his throat. Where it mingled with a very nearly primal fear.

If she wanted to go, if that was her plan all along, then why should he try to stop her?

Finally, he heaved a huge sigh, sat up, and closed his eyes.

If only she understood how brutally hard all of this really was for him. How ashamed he was to even admit that to himself, let alone her. He didn’t have the words to explain to her that his rigid pride, once his salvation, his armor, was a sort of bondage now, adhered to his soul like decades of paint adhered to a window.

But it had served him in life to date. It had gotten him through. It had formed the core of his personal credo, and for him, in the absence of any kind of safety net of a loving family, having a rigid credo had been like laying down a track under a runaway train.

Chaos had nearly crushed the life out of him when he was twenty-one, when he’d watched his dad hauled off by the feds, and then bore witness to the dismantling of his life in the light of public scorn.

All these years later, he thought he’d dug himself out of the wreckage of his life to get to this house. Which would be his way of getting back to himself.

He now knew in reality he’d been sifting through that wreckage in order to find her.

Himself. Her.

To his heart, it amounted to the same thing, in the end.

He knew it was killing her to walk away.

And still she was doing it.

His whole life system clearly had a flaw if Avalon Harwood wanted to get away from him. How could she not understand that he would literally rather die than deliberately hurt her? And yet apparently just being himself was guaranteed to bring her pain.

The Cat came and sat down next to him. Mac reflexively dropped one of his arms down. The Cat did all the work, rubbing his head to and fro all over Mac’s distracted hand.

Breathing helped. So he just did that for a little while.

He might not be good at parsing out feelings. But he did know how to build things and repair things; he knew how to methodically solve structural problems. And now that his head was a little clearer he felt able to sort through the snarl of words, to peel them from their casings of emotions, feeling around intuitively for that beginning thread that he could follow out of the mess.

And he found both the cause and solution.

She was so scared to trust him that instead of staying here she was going right back to a life that didn’t fit her. That in fact flattened her, dimmed her light. She knew and he knew it. She was going to be miserable.

He was scared, too. Standing-on-a-crumbling-cliff’s-edge scared.

And yet he would do just about anything to make her feel safe in the world.

And in light of that, his own fear underwent an alchemical reaction akin to spinning straw into gold. His fear became courage. Her fear became his cause.

He knew how to fix this. And he knew how to do it the right way. A way that had such structural integrity and permanence she couldn’t doubt it or him, or his feelings, or hers, ever again.

And whether she realized it or not, she was the one who’d already all but told him what to do.

Funnily, if Mike had paid him back the ten grand, he might not be on the precipice of getting everything he ever wanted. Next time he saw Mike, he was going to tell him he was basically a Fairy Godfather.

Mac was feeling a lot more like himself. His palms were a little sweaty, sure. But he could do this.

He reached for his phone, and pulled up a contact, and pressed a number he’d never even dialed from this phone.

Like they always said: go big or go home.

For Avalon . . . he would do both.