Chapter 25

He’d hugged them goodbye at the curb.

He’d kept it as brief and distant as possible, trying not to catch the layers of Trina’s scent—floral shampoo, sharp Ivory soap, lavender deodorant, the smell of her skin, her secret sweet-salty center. Releasing her before the press of her body could penetrate his numbness.

Trying not to crave the bear hugs he’d gotten into the habit of with Phoebe at some point in the last week, but just giving her a kindly uncle’s careful squeeze.

She was not his daughter. She was Stefan Spencer’s daughter, and if Stefan Spencer had never done anything particularly heroic, neither had he pretended to have more to give than he did.

He knew it was wrong, putting them in a shuttle and sending them away, but he hadn’t been able to stand the thought of riding in the car with them.

His head hurt.

He kept seeing Dee’s eyes over and over again, reminding him of what he’d taken away from her.

Trina’s eyes held some of that, too. The accusation.

She hadn’t asked him to drive them to the airport, and he hadn’t offered.

Like last night. She hadn’t come to his room, and when the dark hours stretched without her, he hadn’t gone to her, either. It wasn’t pride. It was what was best for her.

The shuttle pulled away from the curb in front of his house and he was left with Clara, who was sobbing.

He put his arms around her because that was what he knew he should do, but it was like he was touching her through layers of thick cotton wool. Her grief couldn’t reach him, so all he could do was pat her and murmur things that were true but not felt.

Clara was murmuring something indistinct into his shirt, over and over. He tilted his head to listen.

“You should have made them stay.”

But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t that he should have made them stay. It was that he never should have led them on in the first place. He was angry at himself—or rather, he was angry at that other guy, that pre-deployment Hunter—for making them—Trina, Phoebe, and Clara—believe there was some kind of happily-ever-after in their future.

“They don’t belong here, baby. They were just staying here while I was gone, but now that I’m back, they have to get on with their lives. Trina has a special job that’s perfect for her. Phoebe needs to know her father.”

“You’re her father.”

His heart gave a funny, misguided hiccup of hope, as if somehow Clara’s saying it might make it true, but then he thought of the look on Trina’s face after he’d said he didn’t want her to wait around for him to love her again. Closed. Finished. And that was what he’d wanted. To get her to see that hanging around hoping for him to give her what she wanted would end badly, sooner or later. Better sooner than later.

“No, baby, I’m not her father. She has a father. Stefan Spencer.”

Clara’s face turned pink and her eyes got big.

She’d always gotten angry exactly that way, ever since she was a baby.

“Then you’re not my father, either.”

She punctuated her words with a stamp of her foot and stormed into the house.

He knew he should go after her. He should set her straight. He should say, I am your father, and I love you so much.

But maybe he hadn’t loved her enough. He had left her so many times. Duty first, he’d thought. But maybe that was all wrong. Maybe that was his biggest mistake.

He didn’t know how long he stood there in front of the house, not moving. His heart pounding, breath coming so hard he could hear it rasping in his throat. Darkness sinking over him, over the room in the building thousands of miles away, the impenetrable black behind the ragged concrete, and then those eyes. Grief and guilt bound tight around his chest.

When he came back to himself and went inside, Clara’s room had been ransacked, and Clara herself was nowhere to be found.

He searched the house from top to bottom as carefully as he could, holding panic at arm’s length. He searched first in the hiding places she’d favored as a little girl, but when that didn’t pan out, he opened cabinets and crawl spaces, then planted himself facedown on the floor to peer under beds where dust hadn’t been disturbed for years. In the master bedroom closet, he thrust his hand through the small collection of Dee’s clothes he had saved for Clara and swept it across the shelf behind, even though logic told him she couldn’t possibly be hiding there.

His grasping fingertips brushed an object, and something clicked in his mind. Not memory. Recognition. He knew the shape, size, and feel of it.

His mind rejected the possibility even as he clutched it, drew it out of the tangle of musty clothes, and shoved it into his jeans pocket as if he were pushing it back down through layers of memory.

There wasn’t time to think about what it might mean. There was only Clara and figuring out where she’d gone.

Leaving the empty house behind, he raced into the yard. Climbed into Clara’s tree house. No sign of her. Climbed down again. Harnessed himself to the new tree. It occurred to him, clipping in at intervals to peer through the branches, that he no longer cared about building the tree house. That from almost the beginning he had been building it for Trina, to see what she would put inside it, to see how she would stamp it as hers. To feel like they were building something together, their creations intertwined until afterward you could hardly say what was her and what was him.

The thought choked him, and he thought maybe he’d scrap the project, tear out the TABs and brackets and frame he’d built. It would take as long to dismantle it as it had taken to build it, but it would be something to do, something to occupy himself with.

He tromped around the woods, looking for her. Came back and threw open the door of the toolshed, though he knew as he did that it was a futile gesture. Clara hadn’t set foot in that toolshed in years, terrified of its dark corners. He didn’t bother making a study of the little room, where—she had correctly observed—there were spiders aplenty, and snakes, too.

No, she was gone.

And the thing he was most ashamed of was that he was jealous of her, as he was jealous of Trina and Phoebe, because all of them could run away from him and what was inside his head.

“Hunter?”

The three men had materialized on their bicycles like some kind of low-key Hells Angels. Nate dismounted first and reached him.

“What are you doing here?”

“We’re on our way back. From the trip.” Nate shot a look at the contents of his overloaded bike. The three men were scruffily bearded and definitely the worse for wear.

“Thought we’d maybe snag some yard space and a shower if you guys were feeling generous.”

What did generous have to do with numb?

He couldn’t figure it out. It was like a math problem his brain was too tired to solve. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. When he finally spoke, the words that came out had nothing to do with Nate’s question.

“I can’t find Clara.”