Page 41 of Devoured

By morning she hadn’t slept and stopped pretending she was going to.

Lara stood at her little kitchen window with a coffee going cold in her hands and watched the sun come up hard and gold over the flat country and turned the same thing over she'd been turning all night, and got nowhere with it. He kissed her and then he told her it wouldn't go anywhere. She'd been kissed before. She'd been left before, God knew. She had a whole filing system for the ways men did this. But she had no drawer for a man who crossed a crowded bar to put his hand on her like she belonged to him, kissed her like he was drowning and she was the surface, and then stepped back with his face full of something that looked, in the half-second before the wall came down, exactly like grief.

She was angry. That part was easy. What was harder, what she could not get to lie down and be quiet, was that under the anger she still wanted him, wanted him this morning more than she had last night, which she would not have believed possible, and the wanting made her angrier, and the anger fed the wanting, and round it went, all night, until the sun came up and found her exactly where it left her.

Here was the thing she'd come two thousand miles to get away from. Men who said the words and didn't mean them. Men who kept her on a string with charm and called it love. She'd built her whole flight out here on the certainty that the trouble was wanting, that the wanting was the disease, the broken compass that pointed her every time at the man who'd cost her the most.

And then a man had walked into Harvey's last night and put one hand flat on the small of her back and said five words — you good here, Lara — and meant every one of them, meant them with his whole body, in front of a room full of people. No charm in it anywhere. Nothing performed. Just a man planting himself between her and the world like it was the simplest fact he knew.

That was the part that frightened her, standing at the window with the cold coffee. Not that she wanted the wrong man again.

That she might, for the first time in her life, be wanting the right one.

He wasn't her type. The cold, the contempt, the darlin' like a slap, none of it was anything she'd ever have chosen.

Or maybe he was exactly her type, and she'd had the whole thing backwards all along. Maybe he was the only thing she'd ever actually wanted, standing in the one body that had never once lied to her.

The knock came at nine.

She knew it was him before she opened the door. She didn't know how. She just knew, the way the whole bar had known last night that Dean Royston was claiming her as his with every unhurried step, and she stood with her hand on the latch for one breath to get her face where she needed it, and then she opened it.

Dean was on the step with his hat in his hands.

Not on his head. In his hands, turning the brim through his fingers, and that undid something in her before he'd said a word, because she'd never once seen Dean Royston look unsure of his welcome anywhere, and here he was on her landing turning his hat like a boy at a door, and whatever she'd braced herself to be — cold, level, armored — went soft at the edges against her will.

"Can I come in?" he said. "I owe you…" He stopped. Started over, plainer. "I came to explain. Last night. If you'll let me."

She should have made him work for it. She had a whole speech, somewhere, about grown women and being taken home like luggage.

"Coffee?" she said instead.

Something eased in his shoulders, an inch. "Please."

They sat at her tiny table, the one with two chairs that barely fit two people, his knees enormous and out of place under it, both their hands wrapped around mugs they weren't drinking from, and for a while he didn't say anything at all.

Then he said, "Her name was Lucia."

And Lara went still, because she knew that name. Chase had said it, weeks ago, in the kitchen — you haven't looked at a woman since Lucia — said it gentle and final, and she'd understood from the weight of it not to ask. So she already had the fact of it. A wife. Dead. Four years. The shape of the grief that ran under everything in that house.

What she didn't have was the rest. And she understood, watching him turn the mug in his big scarred hands, that the rest was what he'd come to give her, that he was about to hand her the thing itself, not the fact of it.

"I know," she said, quiet. "Chase told me. That you lost her. Not… anything else."

"No." A muscle worked in his jaw. "Nobody tells the anything else."

He looked at the table.

"She wasn't happy here," he said. "I want to start there, because everybody in this town'll tell you it was an accident, a tragedy, terrible thing, and it was all of that, and it's also not the truth, and I'm tired of carrying the version that isn't the truth." He turned the mug. "There was something wrong in her, way down where I couldn't reach it. A sadness. She came to me already carrying it, and I married her telling myself a good life and enough years would fill it in, the way you tell yourself anything you need to be true." His thumb moved on the handle. "It didn't fill in. Whatever it was, out here it had nothing to push against, and it got worse, and she got smaller. Year by year. And I… God help me, I worked. That was my answer to everything. She'd be unhappy and I'd go fix a fence. She'd cry and I'd be up before dawn with the cattle. I told myself I was providing. I was building something for the kids, for us. What I was doing was leaving her alone in a house at the end of the world with two babies and a husband who came in after dark too tired to talk, and I did it for years, and I called it love."

Lara didn't move. Didn't reach for him. Some instinct she trusted told her that the worst thing she could do right now was make a sound.

"She started drinking," Dean said. "I didn't see it for a long time, because I was never there to see it. And when I did see it, I handled it the way I handled everything — I worked harder, made more rules, came down on it like a fence that needed mending. Never once asked her what the drinking was for." He stopped. The next part came out flat, stripped, a thing said so many times in his own head it had worn smooth. "Four years ago she'd been drinking and we'd been fighting, about the same thing we always fought about, about her getting help, me wanting her to see somebody and her telling me there was nothing wrong with her that I'd ever understand, and she took the truck and she left, at night, and she didn't come back. They found her at the bottom of the ravine. She was the only one in the car. She was the only car. There was nobody to blame for it but the bottle and the dark and…" his jaw set "…and the years that put her in that truck."

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere below them a door closed; Elena, going out, giving them the place.

"So that's the how," Dean said. "That's the thing nobody tells you. My wife drank herself unhappy in my house and drove off a road, and the kids' mother is gone, and Giana remembers her and Levi doesn't, and I am the man who did that. Who made a life she couldn't live in and was too damn busy fixing fences to notice she was dying in it."

"Dean." Her voice came out lower than she meant it. "That's not⁠—"