air, words spoken between them that couldn’t be erased, both of them clearly unsettled in the wake of their semi-argument. It caused Tucker physical pain, not being able to haul her across the console into his lap where he would apologize and hold her until the tension dissipated. It wasn’t possible, though. And it never would be.
Tucker tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Mary nodded. “I want to give you the opportunity to see and hear him without revealing yourself. Unless you want to.”
“Nah, I can’t. I…he’s already been pitched so far outside of reality with his belief in UFOs, I’m worried what seeing me would do to him. It’s a whole new can of worms.”
“I understand,” Mary murmured, anxiously chewing her lip. “Are we mad at each other?”
“Come on now, kid. I’m incapable of being mad at you.” He struggled against the urge to reach out and cup her soft cheek. “Thank you. For thinking of this. It never would have occurred to me and now that we’re here, yeah. Yeah, I really want to see him.” He tore his eyes off her and peered through the windshield at the house. “Make sure he’s doing all right.”
“We can sit here a while until you’re ready.”
“This is a town of early risers. The less time we hang around, the better.” He reached into the back seat for the folded white sheet, plus the pillow case for collecting candy and her walking stick. “He won’t see me, but I’ll be right there the whole time, okay?”
“I know you will.”
His stationary heart flipped over at her belief in him. If she could have seen him in that moment, there would have been no mistaking the love. It drenched his expression. Made him feel feverish and freezing cold at the same time, his eyes traveling over her delicate features and memorizing them one by one.
“Tucker?”
“Right. Sorry.” With one last look, he exited the driver’s side and closed the door quietly, crossing to Mary’s, helping her out. Arm in arm, they breached the gate and stepped onto his father’s property, gravel crunching under their feet. They passed his father’s old pickup, same old pile of parts, though it had a few more dings in the back bumper and a fresh, “Ships Happen,” sticker in the rear windshield.
The windows of house were dark, but his sensitized hearing picked up the hum of the satellites on the roof. Static. The frenetic wavering of frequencies. Just like the house’s interior, the night was black, the moon only a sliver, but Tucker was able to navigate them as if it was noon on a sunny day, as opposed to one o’clock in the morning.
“House is straight ahead. Two stories.” He spoke without thinking, filling Mary in on her surroundings. “It used to be robin’s egg blue, my mother’s favorite color, but now it looks like someone dipped a paintbrush in water and swirled the blue with white. A color…kind of what the wind sounds like. Does that make sense?”
Her smile was soft. “Yes.”
Reassured, he looked down at their feet. “The path we’re on used to be stone pavers. Never kept it manicured once my mother left, but it’s definitely cracked and overgrown now.”
They’d almost reached the front porch when Tucker heard the distinct sound of a tool dropping into a chest of more tools. Male mutterings that brought the past ripping back at him through the night air and seizing him around the throat.
“He’s awake. He’s working in the barn,” Tucker managed. “I should have known.”
Mary squeezed his arm. “Take me there.”
He took a moment to brace himself and changed direction, guiding Mary around the back of the house and across the dirt yard, strewn with electronics in various states of repair or assembly, his eyes fixed ahead on the open barn door where a thin line of light speared out like a blade, the fact that nothing had changed imbuing him with a sense of comfort he never expected. All this time, while Tucker had been fighting slayers and learning how to navigate an often unscrupulous underworld, his father had been right here in the barn, still searching for a way to prove his wife had been taken.
Tucker never would have been able to understand that dedication until now.
If Mary were his and she vanished in the middle of the night, he would be searching for her decades later—take that to the bank. He’d search until he found her,