I checked my phone when I got into the room in case I had a message from Liv or Cass, but there were just a bunch of texts from Mitch. Wondering where I was. Being pointedly not upset that I’d sneaked out before dawn.
I had told him I was leaving for Chester. Just hadn’t mentioned when. Plus, we’d broken up. My whereabouts weren’t his business anymore.
I deleted the texts and collapsed back on the bed. Without the work to distract me, my mind thrashed its way inevitably back to the things I least wanted to think about. What were we going to do about Persephone?
It was like a bullet left in a body. The flesh had healed around it; digging it out would cause more damage than leaving it. Stahl dying had sparked new interest in our story, but that would be fleeting; the story belonged to the past. This would be different.
I wished I didn’t care—that I could be like Liv and want only for Persephone to find her way home.
But why should she be able to leave the woods, when I never had?
* * *
I woke up an hour later, jolting out of the recursive chase my mind had concocted—monsters in the forest, a trail that looped and twisted and plunged. My mouth was dry, my head fuzzy. I felt like deer jerky that had been in a hot glove box for a week, and my mouth tasted about the same. And of course I hadn’t remembered to pack a toothbrush.
I combed my hair into a semblance of respectability and walked the hundred yards to the gas station shop next door to find myself a toothbrush. The inside of the Corner Store looked exactly the same as it had when we were kids, simultaneously overcrowded and understocked all at once, with bumper stickers indicating a less than progressive political stance plastered over every inch of the front counter.
The string of bells over the door jingled as I entered, and Marsha Brassey, who’d gained about fifty years of wrinkles in the past two decades, looked up from her Sudoku and pressed a hand over her heart.
“My goodness, if it isn’t Naomi Shaw,” she said.
“It’s Cunningham now, Marsha,” I corrected with strained patience, tired of saying it.
“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry—getting dotty in my old age,” Marsha said, flapping a hand helplessly.
“Tell you what, I’ll let it slide as long as you never make me pay off my Snickers tab.”
She reached over to the candy rack and grabbed a bar to waggle in my direction. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I took it with a smile, like I didn’t remember her smacking my backside with a broom for even looking too long at the candy she knew I didn’t have the money to buy. Every bad thing that had ever been said about me dissolved like sugar in water when I turned into a miracle. When Chester suddenly decided that after a childhood of being on the outside, I belonged to them.
“What brings you back to town?” Marsha asked as I worked my way down the aisles, grabbing the toiletries I’d left behind.
“Just visiting folks,” I said over my shoulder.
“You been up to see your dad yet?” she asked, all sweet like she wasn’t just salivating for a bit of gossip.
“That I have, Marsha,” I said, bringing my purchases up to the counter. “I’m doing what I can, but you know him.”
“Stubborn runs in the family,” she said wisely as she rang me up. “Shame to see the place so run-down.”
I choked on a laugh. “It was a piece of shit when Grandpa built it, Marsha. I wouldn’t waste any grief over it.” She tutted.
The bell over the door rang again, and a man in a denim jacket and red flannel shirt stepped in. He was tall and rangy, with hair that fell to his jaw. Sharp features and deep-set eyes gave him a hawkish look.
His eyes caught on mine and widened, and I started to arrange my features in the neutral-but-friendly expression I’d practiced, the one that was the closest to a smile I could manage without unsettling people. And then I recognized him.
“Naomi?” he said. Cody Benham’s voice was rougher and deeper than I remembered it, but I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him the second I saw him.
“Cody,” I replied, and the past that had been lapping at my heels like surf on the beach hooked me into its undertow.
Cody and Cass’s brother, Oscar, had been best friends. Oscar was the golden boy, Cody the bad influence. Most of the time, he ignored us—our occasional presence the irritating price to pay for Oscar’s company. Now and then, though, he’d give us a stick of gum and a “Hey, kid,” and he’d seemed so impossibly cool and aloof I’d have done anything to earn those scraps of approval.
Hitting the other side of forty hadn’t harmed his good looks, I noted.
“You come back to see Liv and Cass?” he asked.
“Seemed about time,” I answered.
“Because of Stahl, right?”
“What about that bastard?” Marsha asked. “What’d he do now?”
“Don’t you read the paper? ‘That bastard’ died,” Cody said, hands jammed in his pockets and eyes fixed on me.
“Praise the Lord,” Marsha declared. “Congratulations. Or is that not what you say?”
“Under the circumstances, I think congratulations are in order,” Cody said, but I could only shake my head, the tiniest of movements. He looked at me steadily, and the genial expression I’d stitched to my face faltered. “Are you free? We could grab a drink, catch up. It’s been ages, and honestly, a drink with an old friend is exactly what I need right now.”
Old friend? It wasn’t how I’d have described it. He was twenty-two the summer he found me in the woods, twice my age, and he’d left town before I graduated high school. But maybe whatever we’d been to each other had turned into friendship in the gap, growing up with or without us.
I shrugged. “I don’t have any plans.” And being alone with my thoughts hadn’t treated me well so far today.
“Try not to sound so enthusiastic,” he said with a glint of amusement in his eye. “I promise, I’m much better company than I used to be.”
I chuckled obligingly, but I’d always liked Cody’s company, despite his indifference to us. Maybe because of it. I remembered slipping out behind the Greens’ house to where he was leaning against the fence, smoking. I’d leaned there next to him, and he’d offered me a drag of his cigarette and only laughed a little when it made me immediately start coughing.
I’d been a little in love with Cody Benham even before he saved my life, that day in the woods.
When I remembered anything about the time between the attack and the hospital, it was him—his face above me, the light and shadows flickering across his features as he ran. Most of all I remembered the feeling of his arms. The strength of them.
I finished paying. Cody had just come in for the newspaper, which he tucked under his arm before holding the door open for me. I counted my steps as I moved past him, pressing back firmly against the fear at the sensation of a body that close, behind me where I could sense him but not see him.
Outside I turned casually, like I just wanted to talk to him and not like I was going to have a panic attack if I let someone follow behind me. I walked backward, hand shading my eyes against the sunlight. “So what brings you back into town?”