His watching. The letters. It was his way of staying with her even though they couldn’t be together, not in this life. Not in the life that Kreskey had created for them. It would be impossible to make anyone understand that.
She walked to the window while Gillian and Greg chatted.
The street was quiet, no strange cars parked. No stranger lurking in the shadows.
There were two Hanks. The one who had moved on, and the one who hadn’t. Where was he tonight?
She rejoined her husband and friend, popped open her laptop and scrolled through the Instagram feed she’d found. Greta Miller had a lovely, peaceful feed of northern birds—the chickadee, the red-tailed hawk, the robin, the swallow, the American crow. The images were crisp and detailed—the shining texture of blue-black feathers, the glint of a beady eye, shiny as glass, the delicate grasp of a clawed foot on a birch branch, an owl, fluffy and ferruginous, peering out from the hollow of a tree.
Rain had called Greta Miller. The phone number she’d managed to unearth from the online directory just rang and rang and didn’t allow her to leave a message. There was an autoresponder to the email account listed on Greta’s website that stated quite clearly that Greta didn’t answer mail, that images were for sale at a local gallery and that assignment queries should be directed to her agent at Lang and Lang, in New York City. She was semiretired.
Rain felt the agitation of the modern world. Didn’t everyone want to be instantly available all the time? Couldn’t the internet connect you to anyone in a millisecond? She left a message on Instagram; Greta Miller apparently couldn’t be bothered with Facebook or Twitter.
An introvert. And thank goodness for them. Every journalist knew that they are the only ones paying attention. The only people who aren’t hypnotized by their devices, not chattering away on the phone, not staring at some pointless app, or playing some time-sucking game. They’re watching.
Rain googled, scrolling through images of Greta Miller herself. The only pictures of her were from the early 2000s. She was slender and petite as a young woman, fine-featured with doe eyes, russet hair, starkly arched eyebrows—it could have been the same woman she saw in the woods. But she couldn’t be sure. She’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, show up for a visit.
“So,” she said, looking for a distraction. She snapped the laptop closed. “What happened with Chris?”
Gillian peered at Rain over her phone with a cryptic smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I thought you two were done,” said Greg, draining his second glass of red.
“We are,” Gillian answered, sounding final. She twirled a honey strand of hair. Then, “Or we were. The truth is, I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Is that who keeps texting you?” Rain pressed.
Greg cleared his throat. “This sounds like girl talk. I’ll go check on Lily. Then I’m going to veg out in front of the game.”
He leaned in to kiss Rain on the head, then tossed a wave to Gillian.
“You’re lucky,” she said when he was upstairs. There was that phrase again. Lucky Rain Winter. “He’s a good one.”
“He could have been yours,” Rain reminded her. Gil dated him first, then moved on to someone else—the tattoo guy, actually.
She waved Rain off with a laugh, and a sip of wine. “Oh, no, why would I choose the smart, kind, upstanding man when I could have the bad boy who talks me into a tattoo I’ll regret for the rest of my life?”
“Chris is a good guy,” Rain offered.
Gillian wrinkled her eyes at Rain. “Is he, though? Sometimes he seems like a good guy. Sometimes he seems like an asshole. Distant. Uncomfortable with real intimacy. Controlling, a little. Then absent.”
Maybe we all have multiple selves. The trick was finding someone you could live with—all of them.
“You slept with him?” nudged Rain.
“He’s hot,” Gillian said with a roll of her eyes. She leaned back, stretched lean arms over her head. “So, so hot. That’s the problem. When he puts those hands on me, I melt.”
“I think maybe you love each other.” She meant it. Which didn’t necessarily mean that it would work. “I hope he steps up and acts like the man you deserve.”
Gillian raised her glass to Rain, and they clinked over the coffee table. “Here’s to the men we deserve.”
“Cheers,” said Rain.
“Okay, so what’s next?”
“I’ll see Greta Miller.”
“And I’ll proofread the proposal and outline you put together and get it to Andrew for