Chapter 22

He was gone when she woke up, and she knew. She lay there and stared at the sun chinking through the blinds and she ached all over from her exertions yesterday, and that deep pain felt like a harbinger.

He could be downstairs making her breakfast. He could be preparing a tray to bring up to her. He would show up in the doorway and say, “Look what I made for you!” and he would set it across her lap. Thank her for being there for him when he’d been hurting in the middle of the night. Apologize for having yelled at her. Tell her she’d done it, she’d fixed it, just like she’d said she would.

Only she knew he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t.

After a while, she got out of bed and took a long, hot shower. She dressed in jeans and a dark gray fitted T-shirt, and she went out into the kitchen and made herself a bowl of granola. She checked on the girls, who were rollerblading in the street outside the house.

She crossed into the backyard, walked through the woods on what had become almost a well-trodden path, and found him just where she’d known he’d be. Up the tree. He’d just drilled a hole inside a larger hole.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to sink a TAB,” he said.

She wanted to see it. She wanted to watch as the tree house took shape, as he anchored it, as he built it. She wanted to design it and make it hers. Theirs.

She wanted to stay.

Part of her had probably always known she didn’t want to go. Part of her had always known that L.A. was a poor consolation prize for what she and Phoebe couldn’t have.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

It was disconcerting, talking up at him, but she knew she had no choice. She knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t, face her right now.

He touched the edge of the hole he’d drilled, testing. Not looking down at her. But she knew that he knew she was there. His whole body radiated awareness and tension.

She could walk away, but she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t lay everything on the line, despite the fact that she knew it wouldn’t change the way he felt. Or didn’t feel.

“I don’t have to go, Hunter. I could call Stefan and tell him to offer the job to someone else. I could say I changed my mind. That I—”

She was going to lose her nerve if she didn’t just spit it out.

“—That I love you. And I don’t need any other reason to stay.”

She took a deep breath.

He’d stopped moving. He rested in his harness, his body an L, his legs slightly bent against the tree trunk. And then slowly he lowered himself, walking down the solid column of the tree’s strength, until his feet were on the ground again. His eyes drilled into her.

“You think you don’t.” His voice was low. Angry. “You think you don’t, now, but you will. I know you want me to ask you to stay. But if I do that, a week, a month, a year from now, you’ll be looking at me with big Bambi eyes, asking what you can do to make things okay.”

She shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “That’s not true, Hunter.”

“You’ll end up hating me for not giving you what you need.”

“No. No.”

“And I’ll hate you for wanting more than I can give.”

It was surprising how much that hurt. Like something splintering in her chest. The last few days, the blooming tenderness between them, the joy, the ferocious need—that he could have been with her through all of that and still doubt.

She got angry then. Fast, like the anger had been waiting right beneath the surface, boiling there, brewing under her patience with the two-steps-forward-and-one-back, the forbidden connections in the dark, the slow dance in the light.

“Don’t fucking tell me that, Hunter. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. Don’t tell me what you can and can’t give. I’ve seen you. I know you. And you fell in love with me. So if you’re not feeling it now, it’s not because you can’t.”

She took a deep breath.

“It’s because you won’t.”

She was breathless and furious.

“You loved me, Hunter. I know you did.”

He turned away, gazed up for a moment at the thick TABs protruding from the tree. Like strange robotic branches grafted on, half organic, half man-made.

“Maybe I did.”

When he looked at her again, it was almost blankly, absently, the way he’d looked at her those first couple of days, as if she were vaguely familiar but he couldn’t quite place her.

“But I won’t let you give up your life waiting for it to happen again.”

There was such an awful finality in his voice. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.

But the sound, the one like air going out of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, wasn’t her.

They both turned.

Clara was standing at the edge of the clearing. Stock-still, eyes wide.

Hunter started toward her. “Clara!”

But she was already running away.