Anything for Her - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,52
saying too much.
Everyone had layers of self, some of which ended up revealed, others hidden forever. In that respect, she wasn’t any different than most people.
But then she thought about what Nolan had shared with her, and knew it to be a gift. A gift she couldn’t reciprocate without telling him things she’d sworn, cross her heart, never to tell anyone because if she did she’d be endangering her whole family.
But if I trusted Nolan...
She saw the U.S. Marshal’s face as he leaned forward, looking at each of them in turn. “Chances are good you can never go back. Sitting here now, you are not the person you were yesterday. Holding on to who that was will only hurt you, and will possibly put you at risk.
“Don’t think back, don’t tell anyone, become the Nelsons who are moving to Oklahoma because you, Mark—” that was her father’s new name “—were laid off from automobile assembly in Detroit and the economy is so depressed there that you decided to make a completely new start somewhere else.
“You kids have it easiest. Everyone will understand that you’re unhappy about the move. Teenagers never like to leave their friends. You’ll be surprised how few questions people will ask.
“This is a new reality. It is not a game—it’s forever. Don’t look back.” His gaze drilled into each of theirs. “Don’t muddy the waters by sharing with anyone at all the life you had that isn’t in this bible.” He laid a hand on the folder that held all the information they would need about their new identities. “Do you understand?”
They’d all nodded, the way Allie remembered it, except probably none of them really did understand. Certainly, she didn’t. Maybe her dad had—it could be that’s why he’d walked through those days shell-shocked. He was losing a business his grandfather had founded, passed down to his son and then to him. After the Marrs disappeared the business had been sold, and eventually Dad got the money, but by then he was an insurance agent and he’d never tried again to start up his own business.
Mom, in contrast, had been completely focused on what she thought she had to do, to the point where she seemed oblivious to her family’s fears. Allie had watched her with suspicion, trying to figure out what she felt. Allie had decided then that what she saw was pride. Mom had done something big and courageous. Maybe, like most people, she’d never been sure that she could be so brave. That would change a person.
Under the weight of all the memories and her guilt that she couldn’t tell Nolan the truth, she almost dreaded seeing him this morning, for the promised tour of his workshop and lunch at his house.
Yesterday, with Sean along, she could suppress her tangled emotions more easily than she could alone with Nolan. It was okay when his eyes heated with desire, but what made her squirm were the other times, when she saw his kindness and patience and hope.
And she used to think of herself as serene!
Nolan’s directions took her out of town. The distance between driveways grew. Horses and sometimes cattle grazed behind board or barbed-wire fences. Occasional fancy new houses somehow looked pretentious next to the gently aging farmhouses that were their neighbors. Allie would have been awfully surprised if Nolan’s house had been new or fancy, and of course it wasn’t.
No animals at all grazed in what must be his pastures. They grew wild, the grass waist-high and tangled. Thickets of blackberries were trying to take over. A barbed-wire fence had sagged and rusted. She could see a tall white farmhouse and at least two other roofs. At the head of the driveway stood a single mailbox next to a simple sign with the words burned into wood: The Stone Man.
Allie smiled at that, and drove up the asphalt driveway, smoother than the road. The driveway looked out of place between the neglected pastureland on one side and alder and cedar and vine maple woods on the other. It widened in front of a detached garage, she discovered, and curved to stop at double sliding doors on the long, low third building.
The basketball hoop she’d heard about hung on the peak of the garage. Nolan had even painted a free-throw line and what she thought was a three-point line on his court. She parked carefully to one side. Nolan was walking toward her from the workshop as she got out.