Page 141 of In the Dark of the Past

“I’ve been thinking, too,” she said. “About where I came from. About whether I was ever actually planning to go back, or whether I’d been using it as a place to be from rather than a place to be.” She set the mug down. “I think I was using it.”

“Maple Ridge isn’t easy,” I said. “Even without the last weeks’ happenings.”

“No,” she said. “But I stopped being afraid of it somewhere along the way. I’m not sure exactly when. I noticed it was gone before I noticed it leaving.”

I thought about that and what it meant for the nine years she’d spent away from here, how much of that time she’d been carrying Maple Ridge as a weight she’d thought she was running from and had actually been running toward. Whether this counted as coming home or as arriving somewhere new.

“What are your thoughts?” she asked. “The ones from the cabin.”

I looked at her.

I’d been carrying the answer since the cabin. Since before the cabin, if I were being honest with myself, which I’d been trying to be. Since the storm, maybe. Or since the night I walked into the library basement and she looked at me like something she’d survived. Right then, I’d thought: There she is. As if nine years hadn’t moved her an inch in my mind, just sharpened her into something more precisely herself.

The fear—the actual fear, not the operational worry or the case or the hundred practical reasons to wait—was that I’d say it and she’d hold it carefully and set it down. How you set something down when you didn’t want to break it but also couldn’t carry it.

But she was still here. She’d stayed through all of it, and she was still here. And at some point, staying counted as an answer, even before the words.

“I’d like you to stay,” I said. Just that. No qualifications.

She was quiet for a moment, though not the quiet of someone who didn’t have an answer. It was more the quiet of someone taking a real answer seriously before they gave it back.

“I know,” she said finally.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t. But it’s honest.” She met my eyes. “I want to stay. It hasn’t been about needing to stay. I think I’ve wanted to stay since about the third day. But I hadn’t let myself say it yet because saying it felt like the kind of thing you did after, not during, and we weren’t after yet.”

“We’re after now,” I said.

She looked at the bar—at Cade behind it, at the town of Maple Ridge having its weeknight reckoning around us, at the long table where the Murder of the Month Club had fully built the case that had just put Lucas Grant in a federal vehicle.

“We’re after,” she said.

I reached across the table. She put her hand in mine, no hesitation.

We sat like that for a while.

Outside, Maple Ridge was still going, the phones and the conversations and the town learning to read itself differently. It would take time. A long time, probably. The Benevolence Fund had been infrastructure for decades, and infrastructure left marks even after it was torn out. There would be hearings, testimony, things that surfaced slowly, and things that surfaced all at once. There would be people who had known and people who hadn’t and people who had told themselves a story they’d believed because it was easier than the alternative.

The town would have to do the same work River had done—hold multiple things at once, the grief and the anger and the strange exhausted satisfaction, all of it at the same time, no single definitive feeling.

That was okay. Towns could do that. People could do that.

River’s thumb moved against my wrist.

“Four days of sleep,” I said.

“At a minimum,” she said.

“After that.”

“After that,” she said, and the way she said it, like a plan, like a beginning, made my chest do that thing it had been doing since she walked back into Maple Ridge and straight into maybe the worst three weeks of both our lives, yet stayed anyway.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” she agreed.

Cade appeared at the edge of the booth with a look that was aggressively not-noticing. “Either of you want something a little stronger?”