Her voice drops into a new place. ‘I wish you had.’
Walker sees his whole life passing before his eyes, and it is over. ‘Oh, Jessie,’ he says with real regret, ‘Wade says you guys are getting close.’
‘He’s a good man.’ She can’t hide the sigh. ‘Yeah, we are.’
He does not say what he is thinking. I wish it could be me. With Jessie, he is never angry. They go back so far that he knows what she will and won’t do, and there’s so much between them that the main ingredient is trust. Right now she is listening. She’s listening hard, but Walker is too much what he is to risk it.
He will not mess up another life. He loves her, just not the way he loved Lucy, and it makes him generous. ‘Go for it, Jess. Enjoy your life.’
She says for both of them, ‘I am.’
‘You’ve been through a lot.’
‘So have you.’
‘Wade will take good care of you.’
Walker tried to relinquish the possibility; she’s trying too, but she’s still out there, waiting for something he can’t give. It’s hard, watching her face come to terms with the future she’s trying to project. ‘After a while you just want somebody to be there when you get old.’
‘You deserve the good stuff.’
‘We all do.’ Her tone lifts. ‘Wade and I are looking at a wonderful house in Coral Shores.’
‘Coral Shores. Where everybody who is anybody . . .’
‘They’re nice people, Walk.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘And you won’t be a stranger, will you.’ Statement, done deal, as far as Jessie’s concerned. ‘Sunday dinners, after we move in?’
‘I don’t know.’ Walker wants to tell her he’d love that – he would, but he’s much too conflicted to guarantee anything. His temper is such that he can’t be sure what will come down in any given situation. At bottom, he’s always aware of the potential and it makes him afraid, not for his own safety but theirs. Because of what could happen to people he loves if something comes down and they are standing too close. ‘I don’t think so.’ But this is Jessie. Like a dedicated artisan, he makes a smile for her. ‘But I’ll try.’
Then her voice changes. ‘I don’t know if I ever thanked you for what you did.’
‘Please don’t.’ Brad Kalen. Fucking Brad fucking Kalen, with Jessie flattened in wet sand under the mangroves where the rich bastard dragged her one drunken night, bent on battery and humiliation. After the rape. Heedless and stripped right down to his hairy, brute arrogance, convinced they were alone. After he beat the crap out of Kalen, he should have turned him in. For all the good that would do. Old Orville’s money will get him out of anything – it always did. Then the part of Walker that he can not suppress pre-empts with: If I’d had the power then . . .
But Jessie’s saying, ‘It changed a lot of things for me.’ She adds sweetly, ‘How I valued myself.’
‘You don’t need to thank me, it was a given.’ He pulled Jessie out of the sand and took her home crying; at the front door she hugged him and they never spoke of it again. Fucking Brad Kalen. Walker’s belly tightens and his fists clench. Yeah, he had to lay waste and pillage on the way to Jessie’s rescue. Years before he knew what he was. Is.
‘That’s not what Brad thought,’ Jessie says without inflection. ‘He said since I was everybody’s, he should get the biggest piece.’
‘I should have killed him.’ It would have prevented a lot of things. Walker is too distressed to number them, but the worst one ended in the release of the terrible power that changed his life. He grips the steering wheel, anchoring himself. It takes him a moment to realize that Jessie is still talking.
‘It made a tremendous difference to me.’ Framed in the car window, she bends down to make clear how important this is. ‘Like, all the difference in the world, and I never really thanked you.’
But Walker can’t keep on talking about it this way; the ugly inside him is simmering. Shit, he thinks. And I hoped I was done with that. Reaching up, he touches her face to get her attention. ‘I knew,’ he tells her. ‘I love you Jessie, but you’d better