time, she pretended to laugh with him as her heart raced. He hadn’t noticed. Sometimes Hannah thought what she loved most about Huck was his obliviousness. His willingness to not look too deeply.
They’d met at a brewery in the next town over. Before Hannah worked in marketing for a PR firm, she’d tended bar in the evenings while she job hunted. Huck had come in with his rowdy friends, him in jeans and a T-shirt, them in suit shirts and loosened ties. His fingernails with their blackened crescent moons had struck her as odd among all the manicures. Bartenders noticed hands. The first words she spoke to him were “You don’t fit in,” and he’d grinned at her, thrown an extra ten on the bar top. Before he left, he slid his business card under the tip, scrawled neither do you on the back.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked, the silence in the car wearing thin. He’d been more patient with her than required, but Hannah suspected this trip would try him. Huck hated messes, despised melodrama.
And now he was about to get his trial by fire and perhaps more answers than he’d ever wanted. Hannah wondered if he’d be there at the end of it. Would he stay if he knew the whole truth? That last summer, her sister, Wyatt. The knot in her stomach tightened, and she stopped, swallowed back the panic in her throat.
She’d worked so hard to relegate her childhood, her sister, and her aunt and uncle to the background of her life. She never examined her childhood in direct light, only in periphery—dreams where Julia was still alive, racing her back through the forest, the sunlight blinking between the leaves. And now they were going back. Her shiny new life, handsome fiancé, everything she’d ever wanted.
She wanted to go home.
“I’m fine,” Hannah answered quickly and pushed open the car door. “I haven’t seen her in seventeen years. I’m fine.”
It was still cool, the sun barely cresting the horizon. They rolled a window partway down for Rink, who paced in the back seat, excited, whining. Huck let him out briefly to go to the bathroom, the leash taut as he sniffed around bushes on the hospital lawn.
“I’ll come back if we’re in there too long,” Huck assured her when they locked the car door. He took care of things. He was the task man of their little team, always. What was Hannah? The compliant one, the go-along girl. Girl with big ideas, he sometimes called her, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
She walked into the hospital a good ten feet in front of Huck (briefly reminded of Josh tagging along behind Julia all those summers ago), but she couldn’t have articulated why. Inside, she was directed by the administration desk to a family-crisis center. The room was small, a few couches and a chair. A round coffee table and a sideboard with a Keurig. She touched nothing and did not sit. When a woman entered and introduced herself as a crisis counselor, Hannah didn’t flinch. Huck tried to touch her again, a gentle palm against the small of her back, but she moved slightly out of his reach, so his hand was left dangling in midair.
“I’m Claire McKinney.” The woman was older than Hannah, probably only by a few years, but her hair was streaked with gray. She took Hannah’s cue and also did not sit but instead held Hannah’s arm with both hands and spoke succinctly but kindly. “I’m afraid your aunt has passed away.”
Hannah felt the punch in her lungs, heard the whoosh of air before realizing it was her own breath. Willed her brain to focus on the woman’s words.
Claire McKinney told Hannah about the crash, the car moving too fast down the winding road, away from the castle, hitting a slick patch from recent rain, and pitching over the guardrail and into the ravine. Someone had come along and seen the lights in the car, the coiled smoke from the hood, and called 911, but Aunt Fae’s internal injuries were too serious. The rescue effort had been a bit of an undertaking. (Hannah remembered the steepness of that ravine on Valley Road, having flown away from the castle in a speeding car herself.) They were sorry, of course, but would Hannah be able to identify the body? No other family member was listed. (They were all dead now, see?) All Hannah could say was, “Absolutely, of course, anything for Aunt Fae.” Claire