“I’d be troubled if you turned my offer down.” My father waves a dismissive hand. “You know that. Nell and I get tired of rattling around this big house all by ourselves. It’ll be good to have you here.”
Darius hesitates, but gives no further protest. He picks up his suitcase. I approach him and reach for the other bag—upon closer look, I realize it must be his camera bag. He holds up a hand in a gesture that clearly signals he doesn’t want me to come any closer.
“I’ve got it,” he says.
I stop and turn back to the door, unaccountably bothered by his “stay away” demeanor. I shouldn’t be. His psychic scars must run fathoms deeper than mine. Wariness of people, even me and my father, is probably the least of them.
But I remember a time when touching came naturally to him. A time when we’d sit together while he read me a book or showed me how his camera worked. A time when he’d rub my head affectionately and hold my hand.
How many people has he touched since he came back?
He embraced my father, but I guess I don’t merit the same treatment. Not that I’d be comfortable hugging him now anyway.
“You can follow me.”
I lead him up the stairs to the second-floor hallway, where closed doors face the bare walls and thin carpet. At the base of the narrower staircase leading to my attic, I open a door to reveal the guest bedroom.
“It’s closest to the bathroom.” I step into the room. “And it has a view of the oak tree in the backyard, so I thought you’d like it the best.”
He follows, setting his suitcase on the floor. Though I’ve been wary about having Darius in our house, I spent a couple of days preparing the room for a guest. The task gave me something to do and kept my mind off everything that has happened in recent years.
I remade the bed with new, navy sheets, polished the wrought-iron headboard and the scarred, maple furniture, and even bought a couple of bright, botanical prints to liven up the dreary walls. I’d put a vase of dried flowers on the dressing table and a crystal pitcher and glass on the nightstand in case he was like me and always kept water near the bed.
He glances around the room. My fingers curl into my palms. It’s not any five-star hotel, but it’s clean and tidy.
“This is nice,” he says. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
The stiff formality between us stirs my resentment. He’s so polite, as if everything inside him is tightly in check.
“The bathroom is right across the hall.” I gesture to the door. “There are clean towels, and new toothbrushes and soap and stuff in there. Do you need anything else?”
“Not at all. I appreciate it.”
“I’ll go,” I say.
He nods. Because I don’t want him to give me another “back off” gesture, I move cautiously toward him. There’s plenty of space between us, but my heartbeat increases as I pass him on my way to the door.
I catch his scent, something primitive and earthy—forest moss, tree bark, pinecones. I don’t remember what he smelled like six years ago. Adventure, maybe. Excitement. Heroism. Nothing ordinary or mundane.
“Good night,” I say as I step into the hallway, but the door closes behind me, and I don’t know if he heard.
CHAPTER 2
Nell
“You remember him, don’t you?”
My father asked me that when he told me a month ago that Darius Hawke was coming to live with us for the school year.
I’d nodded, though the question was preposterous. I’d never known the world without Uncle Darius in it. My mother’s stepbrother for the eight-year-long marriage of their parents, Darius was the risk-taking, fascinating hero who brought the world with him when he came to visit us on one of his reprieves from his demanding career.
In addition to being my father’s closest friend since they were teenagers, Darius was like a controlled, self-contained version of my mother—all of the adventure and daring but none of the unpredictability and violence.
Just the opposite, in fact. He put himself in the line of fire all the time, but for me he was the epitome of safety.
Darius and my father were the most stable parts of my childhood, the foil to my mother’s turbulence. But the last time I saw Darius was at her funeral when I was twelve. He’d flown in from Berlin, where he’d been living for the previous two years.
I was still sitting in the front pew of the church. He crouched in front of me, balancing on the balls of his feet so he was looking up at me rather than down. He was the only adult who’d never given me offhanded, pitying glances.
“If there’s one truth I’ve ever known in life, Nell,” he said, “it’s that having a mother who loves you with her whole being, the way your mother loved you, is a gift that will stay with you forever.”
I felt a little bit better, knowing he was right. I also realized he and I shared the same pain of losing our respective mothers far sooner than we should have. Though I didn’t know much about Darius’s biological mother, I’d heard that she had died when he was very young. I wondered what he remembered about her.
“Will we see you again soon?” I asked.
“I hope so.” He rose and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll try to come back.”
But he didn’t. Not until now.
I sleep badly the night of Darius’s arrival. The house creaks and groans around me as if it, too, senses the presence of a stranger. The guest bedroom is directly below my attic room, just beneath me. Before dawn, the second-floor shower starts.
Whether from lack of sleep or genuine curiosity, more questions pop into my head.
What does he look like?
Does he have scars or other physical evidence of what he endured?
How does he feel about his body now, after having had no control over what happened to it?
Does he like the sensation of touch or does he merely tolerate it?
Even in the privacy of my bedroom, I’m embarrassed that I’m thinking of Darius in such an intimate way. Still, the questions drift through my head until the water stops.
Doors downstairs open and close. My father is already awake—he rises at five and goes straight to work in his office before leaving for the Evergreen College campus.
Finally, I push myself out of bed. I always go downstairs and eat breakfast before getting dressed, but I don’t want Darius to see me in my pajamas. After washing up in the bathroom connected to my room, I dress in my usual attire of jeans and a baggy, button-down shirt.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I look the same as always. I wear no makeup, and my skin is pale and wan. I didn’t inherit my mother’s fine-boned face, her blue eyes and thick blond hair, her elegant, dancer-like body. I didn’t inherit my father’s regal, patrician looks either.
Instead I have some ancestor’s structured features, gray eyes, sharp cheekbones, and bold eyebrows. I’m average in height and weight. My plain brown hair hangs in a lifeless mass halfway down my back—uncut and unshaped for years.
What does he think of me, this unkempt, sullen teenager? This ugly lump of a girl who walks with her head down and her shoulders slouched because she can’t bear to face the world?