anniversary is also, coincidentally the anniversary of the day we met—makes me remember the first time I saw him.
“He’s back for me,” I say. I’m not sure I really believe this; I’m testing out the words on the air. He steps into our room, closes the door behind him, and turns on the light. I hear the door open and shut downstairs; Drew’s SUV rumbles to life in the driveway, then drifts off.
“Annie,” he says quietly.
“It’s different this time. I can’t explain how. It’s different.”
He sits on the bed. I can see the purple shadow of a shiner under his right eye. His bottom lip is split and swollen. He doesn’t need any more scars. His body is a minefield of injured and broken places, places that have been cut and ruptured and never healed quite right. We’re compatible that way, except that my skin is flawless. It’s my psyche that’s a minefield.
I tell him what happened on the beach. He listens with his eyes on me; I can’t read his expression. He taps his foot quickly on the floor as I talk, something he does when he’s stressed or working a solution to a problem. When I’m done, he’s quiet for a while, as though he’s searching for the words he needs. He asks a few questions: Did I see his face? What was he wearing? Was it very windy?
“Did Drew tell you about the phone call from my father?” I ask when he gets up and walks over to the doors leading to our balcony. He’s looking at the beach; the clouds have parted, and the beach is washed in gauzy silver moonlight.
He nods. “Maybe that’s what has you so spooked, Annie. Maybe that’s what’s different about this time.” He extends his hand to me, and I join him by the doors. He points out the window.
“Look how much light there is out there. Look at that couple walking on the beach.”
There’s a young girl in a sweater and jeans, holding the hand of a tall, thin young man. They walk slowly, arms swinging.
“With so much light, you would have been able to see something about him.”
“There was someone there,” I say quickly. “Esperanza saw him. The police saw his footprints.”
“I don’t doubt there was someone. But it wasn’t Marlowe Geary.” He turns to me, touches my face. “Isn’t it possible that you saw someone, became frightened, and your mind did the rest?”
I don’t answer immediately. Then, “He called me Ophelia.”
He walks away from me, lies down on the bed with a sharp exhale of breath. I stay by the door watching him.
Gray is not a handsome man, not in the classical sense. Though there’s something in the way he carries himself that makes a girl forget he’s not easy on the eyes. He is older than I am by twelve years. There’s a hard silence to him, a shell you’re not sure you want to crack. There was no reason for me to fall in love with him. In fact, the circumstances of our meeting were not conducive to the start of a relationship. The first time I met Gray, he handcuffed me and threw me in the back of his car. He wasn’t sure what to do with me, and he couldn’t leave me as he found me, or so he would tell me later. I was a mess of a girl, nearly starved and half crazy with fear and grief. Anyone else in his position might have just left me to fend for myself. He could have turned me over to the police or dropped me at a hospital. But he didn’t.
“I loved you before I even knew I loved you,” he told me once.
“Then why the handcuffs?”
“I loved you, but I didn’t trust you. You can’t trust a beaten dog. Not until it learns to trust you.”
“That’s not a very flattering analogy.” Though I suppose that’s what I was then, a dog so badly beaten that I wouldn’t have known the difference between a hand poised to strike and one poised to caress.
He touched me in that way he had, to soften his words, a gentle stroke on the back of my head that ends in him tracing my jaw and then resting his hand on my cheek. “Sorry.”
There was no reason for us ever to be together and every reason for us never to see each other again after he got me the help I needed and then made Ophelia disappear completely. I