on but the hatred that consumed her, had he actually done this? She was smoldering before he cleared the city limits, although it would be hours before Walker knew it.
Nobody saw him come or go.
There was nothing going on in the darkened house behind him that Walker could see in his rear-view mirror. Still he left Fort Jude pursued by a sick, bad feeling. The encounter left him feeling soiled, corrupted by emotions like sparks that ignited somehow, filling the room behind him. Furious, he tried to outrun his rage. Anger kept pace, but whether it was his or hers, he is still not certain. He hit the accelerator hard, hurtling away from the house, but the anger followed, with guilt sniffing at its heels. In the dark street behind Walker Pike, something happened. He didn’t see it, but at the exact moment his gut twisted.
Knowledge went through him like a tremor along a fault line.
He drove straight through to Boston.
By the time he got there it was all over the news.
The Globe carried photos courtesy of the Fort Jude Star.
Walker locked himself in his room at MIT, reflecting. So that’s what I am.
Lucy telephoned; she called and called but he was too deep in self-disgust to pick up the phone. Recognition came in stages. It marked him to the bone. Lucy knocked on his door, crying out, but he sat there like a figure cast in bronze, the image of what he had become. The son of destruction. She went away. For a long time he kept to his room, riven and terrified.
Before that night Walker Pike lived safely on the fringes but he was in it now, body and soul; he had no name for the power that rocked him.
He couldn’t begin to know what it meant, he only knew that he was dangerous. What he was, or what he was becoming put him outside society. He loved her so much! He couldn’t see her again. Not if he loved her and wanted to keep her safe. It moved and terrified him to care so much about a woman, and to be afraid to be around her for fear it would happen again. Whatever I did. His body shook to the foundations as certainty took hold. He was afraid for Lucy’s safety and the safety of the child he knew he would never see, and that was the end of them as a couple. Walker. Lucy Carteret.
He had to let her go.
Walker let her go because he saw what he was, and it was terrible. The knowledge and the potential. That kind of thing doesn’t happen just once. What kind of monster sets an old woman on fire without touching a match to her? What awful power does he have, that made him destroy another human being without getting close enough to light a fire?
He had too much to tell Lucy, too much he couldn’t tell her. To keep her safe, he telephoned. It almost killed them both. ‘I just want you to know, I love you.’
‘Did you do it?’ Her voice shook.
I love you and I always will. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you murder her?’
‘I love you, and I have to go away.’
‘Did you?’
He wanted to say he loved her at least once more; he knew it would be the last time, but the words seized up in his throat and he choked, ‘Forgive me, I have to go!’
He left for a year to take the job his department chair had lined up for him with Sony in Tokyo. He sent money to her at Radcliffe. It was the only address he had. Somebody rubber-stamped the envelope: NO FORWARDING ADDRESS and sent it back. Back in Cambridge, he went to see the Radcliffe registrar. With Walker sitting across from her, visibly distressed, she broke precedent and told him Lucy dropped out of college. Nobody knew where she went, the dean told him with a judgmental scowl. She was having a baby. He left Lucy to save her life. Its life.
That should have been the end of loving her, but it wasn’t. Some things don’t end.
He loved their baby too. He loved them both but given what he was, he walked away from them. He had to. For years Walker slouched along alone, miserable and shaggy. He went inside his work to hide.
On bad days he thinks of himself as the sea captain in the story Pop loved to tell back when he and Wade were small. The captain’s