She was angry. Her green eyes smoldering.
“Didn’t you have something for Ben?”
Shit.
She’d seen him. Somehow, she’d seen him in the toy shop. But he hadn’t brought the slingshot home. He’d gone to his office instead, checked in with Belinda, stashed Kate’s gift in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Hoping to avoid this exact conversation.
“What’d you do with it?” she asked. “I think our son would love to own a slingshot.”
“Theresa—”
“Oh my God, are you actually going to try and deny it?”
He pulled his hands out of the water, dried them on the towel hanging from the stove door handle.
Felt an awful metal burn in the back of his throat that reminded him of the night he’d told Theresa about Kate. His ex-partner was already in Boise when he’d sat Theresa down and spilled everything. He couldn’t live with the lie between them. Respected her too much. Loved her too much. It had never been about him not loving his wife.
Theresa didn’t understand.
That hadn’t been a surprise.
But she didn’t throw him out either.
And that had been.
She had cried and been devastated, but in the end, loved him all the same.
Still.
Despite.
And the strangest thing happened—her response made him love her more. Showed him his wife in a light he’d never seen. Or rather, had missed.
Theresa took a step toward him.
“I saw you there,” she said. “In her shop. I saw you.”
“I was there,” Ethan said. “She gave me the slingshot for Ben, and I didn’t bring it home—”
“Because you wanted to hide it from me.”
“Why would she give me something clearly from her if we were doing something behind your back?”
“But you did hide it from me.”
“Yes.”
Theresa shut her eyes, and for a moment, Ethan thought she might be on the brink of going to pieces.
She opened them again, said, “Then why did you go to see her?”
Ethan put his hands on the stovetop and leaned back.
“It’s work, Theresa, and that’s all I can say.”
“Work.”
“I would never have gone to her otherwise.”
“And I’m just supposed to take your word for that?”
“I love you, and I wish I’d never met her. You have no idea.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
Theresa ran the tap and filled a glass.
Drank it down.
Set it down.
Staring through the window screen, she said, “Look, you got something from her that you couldn’t get from me. Some kind of experience beyond ours. I don’t hate you for it. I never did.” She turned from the sink and faced him, steam rising off the surface of the soapy water. Gaither was playing one of Mozart’s piano concertos. “But that doesn’t mean you didn’t hurt me,” she said.
“I know that.”
“I wonder if she makes you feel the way you make me feel. You don’t have to try and answer that. So it’s for work, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess that means…”
“I can’t talk about it.”
She nodded. “I’m gonna draw a bath.”
“I’m over her, Theresa. Completely.”
He watched his wife walk out of the kitchen, listened to the hardwood floor creaking under her footfalls as she moved down the hall toward the bathroom.
A door closed.
After a minute, he heard the muffled sound of water splashing into the clawfoot tub.
Ethan crawled into bed under the covers.
He lay on his side with his head propped up with one arm, watching his wife sleep.
The warmth of her body heated the space between the sheet and the comforter.
She’d left the window cracked open an inch off the sill and the air creeping in was cold enough to make him wish he’d pulled another blanket out of the oak chest at the foot of their bed.
He thought he might drift off for a half hour or so, and he tried to shut his eyes, but it just wasn’t happening.
So rarely did his mind ever stop.
Kate had undoubtedly read his note.
But what had she made of it?
Sitting in the coffee shop seven hours ago, he’d finally decided on a course of action.
Ripped a strip of blank newsprint off the latest edition of the Wayward Light and written:
They know about you. They’re watching you. They sent me to investigate you. Mausoleum. 2:00 a.m. Tonight.
12
1:55 a.m.
No moon and a billion stars in a black, black sky.
Frigid.
The small, duckless pond in the city park beginning to rim with ice.
In the afternoon, one of Pilcher’s men had delivered a new Bronco to the curb in front of Ethan’s house, the SUV identical to its predecessor, if not a trace shinier.
But Ethan had chosen to walk.
He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his parka, fingertips tingling in the cold.
Soon he was moving alongside the river, the ruckus of water passing over rocks and the clean, sweet smell of it in the night air.
Had it only been two weeks since he’d crossed this river in the dead of night, the entire town in pursuit, and fled upcanyon?
He didn’t feel anything like that man anymore.
Ethan climbed over a disintegrating stone wall that looked straight out of a Frost poem, the rocks cold as blocks of ice to the touch.
The gravestones glowed like ancient faces under the starlight and the sound of the river fell away.
Ethan passed through waist-high weeds, through groves of scrub oak.
Here among the dead at the south end of town, the lights of Wayward Pines were all but invisible.
The mausoleum appeared in the distance.
Had she come?
The old Kate would have. No question.
But what about the new one? The Kate who’d lived in Wayward Pines for nine years. The Kate he no longer knew.
Something loitered in the back of his mind. Something ugly and off-balance.
Fear.
What if Kate and her group had tortured and murdered Alyssa Pilcher.
You have no idea what she’s capable of.
He couldn’t rid himself of what Pilcher had said yesterday morning, and as he approached the crypt, it occurred to him—I should’ve brought my gun.
The mausoleum stood in a stand of mature aspen trees that had already dropped their leaves—gold coins scattered in the dying weeds. The stone planters that framed the iron door had long since crumbled, but the columns retained their form.
There was no wind.
The river nothing more than a whisper.
He said, “Kate?”
No answer.
Dug a flashlight out of his pocket, swept the beam through the aspen, called her name again.
Ethan forced the heavy door open, its bottom dragging across the stone with a teeth-aching groan.
He put his light inside.
It fired the stone walls.
The stained-glass window in the back.
She wasn’t here.
He walked slowly around the perimeter of the crypt, shining his light into the surrounding weeds, which were already bending under the weight of a fragile glaze of frost.
Ice crystals glittering in the beam.