“Look, it’s not as simple as you’re tryin’ to make it,” Moira explained.
“Did you have sex with him? Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Moira. “But it wasn’t—”
“And the pilot? Is that how you got that first class seat?”
“Yes. No. If you’d just listen—” Words tripped over themselves to get to the tip of Moira’s tongue, mixing with tears at the back of her throat to become a paste she could neither swallow nor spit out.
Tierra’s eyes flew open wide with shock. “The men! All the men winking at me in the shop today. All those times you disappeared. Oh, Moira. No. Tell me you didn’t.” That look.
Pity. Disgust. Fear. Revulsion.
All her life, she had seen it on the faces of women, the only consolation that they couldn’t know her. Didn’t want to know her. She had grown used to seeing it on the faces of strangers.
But now, it was on her own.
Her own face staring back at her like the mirror capable of showing her to herself.
The world had gone to all this trouble to show her exactly what she had always feared. That old hurt. That loathing for everything she was. Everything she wasn’t. The truth she ran from at every turn. She was someone’s idea of a sick joke. Given powers to heal others but damn herself.
She came, and trouble followed.
Well, that part she could fix.
“Your aunt was right. I shouldn’t have come.” She bolted then as she had so many times before. Wasn’t a body in all of Terrebonne Parish that could catch her, and she guessed her sister wouldn’t be able to either. Not in those lace-up sandals, anyway.
“Moira!” Tierra’s cry was nearly swallowed up by the cozy hum of the crowd. “Come back!”
The brass bell clanked in protest at her hasty departure, and she was vaguely aware of knocking tourists away like bowling pins as she tore up the sidewalk.
Rain pelted her face, and the bruised sky overhead rumbled promises of a real downpour. When her wet flip flops slid off her feet, she left them behind. She was faster without them anyhow.
That’s right. Get the hell out of my way.
A clap of thunder punctuated the thought, rattling the windows of buildings sliding by in her peripheral vision.
The streets were clearing, people shaking off their umbrellas at the doorways to cozy restaurants and bars.
She cut a sharp left at what Tierra had told her was the Hastings Building, easily one of Port Townsend’s most venerated landmarks. Its sky-blue paint had darkened with the rain, drops tracing the nooks and crannies of the façade’s cream-colored columns and scalloped windows.
Tires squealed in some distant reality. The scent of burnt rubber mingled with salt air and wet asphalt invaded Moira’s lungs.
“Moira!” Nick.
She could have picked his voice out even over the howl of hurricane sirens. It pierced her in the same way the loon’s call always did. That otherworldly melancholy beyond human understanding.
If she looked back now, she would stop. The world would catch up with her, and so would he.
Run. All thought concentrated itself around this one word. Cement gave way to wet wooden planks beneath her feet. She could see the ocean beyond and imagined how cool and heavy the water would be in her lungs. Sinking to the bottom like a wrecked ship, she could yield to its siren call of soundless space. Back where she came from. The endless deep pressing quiet hands against her temples to blot out all the pain— her own, and others’.
“Moira, stop!”
Nick’s footfalls echoed behind her like a horse’s galloping gait.
Gaining on her. He would overtake her before she could get to the edge.
She spurred herself on, muscles screaming, chest threatening to burst. If she could only make one last…
An abrupt, painful force burst around Moira’s middle, and she was jerked backward, her motion arrested so effectively, she wondered if she had run into an unseen guardrail.
Moira’s gaze whipped back over her shoulder to find Nick with a handful of apron ties.
That piece of shit apron.
A fresh wave of rage sent a stream of obscenities cascading from her tongue.
Nick’s hand closed over her arm almost exactly where Tierra’s had and spun her around. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Lord, but the man was huge. Not folded into an airline seat, not separated by a counter or some span of distance, he towered over her, his broad shoulders blocking out a stretch of blackened sky. His rain-soaked dress shirt stuck to every slope