Jessica must’ve felt it too. “You remember that night we met here?” she asked.
“A little,” Matt said. Just the softness of your lips, the volcano erupting inside me, the feeling I’ve been chasing since I was fourteen years old, before loneliness settled into my bones.
“You?” Matt asked.
“A little,” Jessica said in a playful tone that acknowledged they both were lying.
Without thinking it through, Matt asked, “Did you see anything that night? Anything unusual?”
She considered him. “Like, what do you mean?”
He made no reply.
“All I remember is you and me, right here.” She seemed to blush, since they were standing near the spot of the famous kiss. “And then later hearing Ricky’s truck pull up. He was drunk and had no business driving. He and his date were fighting.”
She looked up at him now, as she had that night. Matt had the urge to pull her close, to kiss her. She had a similar look in her eyes.
“It was great to see you, Jessica,” Matt said, breaking the spell. He held out his hand for a shake.
The corner of her mouth turned upward. “It was good to see you too, Matthew. Let’s not make it another seven years.” She turned and vanished into the darkness, just like she’d done that night.
Matt ambled back along the road to the Hub. He stopped in the grass at the center, the moon peeking out from the clouds, providing a sliver of light. He half expected to see the back of his brother’s letterman jacket—PINE in yellow letters above the shoulder blades—pushing a wheelbarrow toward the creek. All at once, he had another memory that had eluded him: the figure stopping in shadows, head pivoting toward Matt. The darkness concealed his face. Yet there was no question: he was staring directly at Matt.
CHAPTER 39
OLIVIA PINE
BEFORE
Liv tipped the bottle so the rest of the pinot noir dripped into her glass. She’d already dispatched a text to Noah, apologizing that she couldn’t make it to dinner. After the encounter with Detective Ron Sampson’s former partner and widow, she’d had her fill of the past. Of this town. She’d have time to lobby Noah to grant the pardon after he was appointed governor. So she’d resorted to every parent’s secret weapon to get out of an engagement: Tommy’s not feeling well.
The truth was that Cindy took Tommy out to dinner. Liv didn’t know if it was because her sister really wanted auntie time with Tommy before they left tomorrow, like she’d said, or if she’d sensed that Liv needed some alone time. Cindy had left not one but two bottles of pinot on the counter, so Liv thought it was the latter. Liv was twisting the corkscrew into the second bottle when her cell phone chimed.
She was going to ignore it, but ever since that morning with Danny when she’d let her calls go to voicemail on her race home from the hotel, she never ignored calls.
Certain things made her superstitious, irrationally so. She’d been taking a nap in the middle of the day when her mom died, and she never napped during the day again. It brought bad things. It had been a lazy winter afternoon when she’d snuggled up with the family dog and gone to sleep, then awoken to Cindy shaking her shoulders, bawling, the last time she’d seen her big sister cry. So no matter how tired she was, she never napped. Even in college, and even when the kids were babies and she was dead on her feet, she never, ever took a midday snooze. Similarly, after she missed Maggie’s call saying the police had taken Danny—correction, after she’d ignored Maggie’s call—she never let a phone go unanswered.
“Hello,” she said expecting a telemarketer or robocall.
“Mrs. Pine, this is Alvita from Twilight Meadows,” the woman said in a Jamaican accent. “I’m afraid your father is missing.”
* * *
It was bad enough she had to deal with her father sneaking out of the home on her last night in town, but even worse was having to ask Noah for help. She’d had too much wine to drive. And she didn’t want to ruin Cindy’s evening with Tommy or put her son through the ordeal. She had little choice but to call him. Besides, she told herself, Noah would be better with the nursing home staff. And he liked playing the white knight; he always had.
“He’s gonna be fine,” Noah said, his hand on the steering wheel. He was one of those people who never lost their cool. She couldn’t recall a single instance when Noah Brawn had lost his shit. When she’d broken it off in college, he was as cool as a cucumber. It wasn’t that he lacked passion. His speeches on false confessions were the stuff of a brimstone preacher. Even his stump speech for mayor back in the day had some fire in it. It was just that his steady-as-they-go demeanor also revealed an emotional distance.