“Do you think that what happened to you and your family has something to do with what’s happening now?” asks Joy gently.
“I wouldn’t have thought so if not for this.” I rest my hand on the article. She’s already placed it back in the binder where it belongs. “I didn’t think anyone knew about me.”
I flip through the binder, glancing over The Hollows Gazette articles, the survey, the copy of the property deed. There’s an unexpected surge of protective pride—my history, my family, my land. However ugly and unwanted, it all belongs to me.
My phone is silenced, but when I feel it buzzing, I take it from my pocket. There’s a text from an unknown number.
I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
Rilke’s poems in The Book of Hours are a kind of prayer, his love letters, his one-sided conversation with God. I stare at the words, feel their meaning in my bones. I hate to admit it but I pulse with longing for you.
Then: Lose him and I’ll come for you. If you don’t get rid of him, I’m gone for good.
The room is spinning, but Bailey and Joy don’t seem to notice.
“What about the Farrow family?” asks Bailey. “Were they connected to any of these families?”
Joy shakes her head, thoughtful, seeming to search her memory.
“Mr. Farrow was a math teacher at the high school. Mrs. Farrow taught kindergarten. When they were killed in that house fire—an accident—their daughter went to live with her grandparents just a few miles away. But she left after high school and did not return here to live.”
“It seems odd though, doesn’t it? Two women connected to this case came from this town. Both with tragedy in their past, both become involved with the same man.”
“Might just be coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“I’m sure there are lots of things you don’t believe in that exist all the same,” she says. “Meanwhile, you don’t understand The Hollows, its strange ways. Maybe it was just a hook, a way to bring Robin home.”
A smile teases at the corner of Bailey’s mouth. “It’s a place, not a person.”
“Some places have power, energy,” she says. I don’t argue because I know it to be true. Even Robin has something to do with that, the little piece of The Hollows that never leaves me, always nudging me to come home. If you don’t know this place, you can’t understand.
Joy doesn’t like Bailey but I think he likes her, or she amuses him anyway. I keep my eyes on him, remembering that kiss, how it felt to be in his arms. Your text. My pull to you. I shake it away.
He gets up and walks the perimeter of the room, looking at the photos hanging on the wall—pictures of the town founders, the old church, the first school. The town’s founding documents sit under glass on a velvet bed.
My phone vibrates again: Tonight.
“So this is your life,” said Bailey. “To record what happens in this town.”
I don’t think he’s being flip or disrespectful. Bailey Kirk is a person who wants to know and understand things.
“That’s right,” she says easily. “We all have our calling. You want to find lost things. Miss Carson wants to help people find their way through the darkness in their lives. And I want to keep the history of this little town in the middle of nowhere.”
He smiles at her, gives her a respectful nod. There’s something else beneath the current of their antagonism, a kind of understanding. It’s weird.
“I guess we don’t always choose,” he says.
“No,” she says, stiffening a little. “Not always.”
He keeps his place by the door. Maybe he’s decided that there’s nothing here to help him, just dusty old documents from a night long ago, my personal tragedy, but nothing more. A trip into the past, but not a thread into the future where he finds Mia.
“It’s all here for you,” says Joy. “I’ll leave you to look through it if you like. Let me know if I can help.”
She rises and disappears behind a door that closes with a soft click.
“Did you get a call?” He nods at my phone.
“Just Jax,” I lie.
He wears a thoughtful scowl, which might be his default expression. But I feel like he knows that I’m lying. If he does, he keeps it to himself, walks over to the stacks, takes a book from the shelf and opens it.
Though I feel a powerful pull to him, can still feel his arms around me, I am going to blow Bailey Kirk off. Hard. I know it’s wrong, and that just hours ago I’ve agreed to help him find you, using myself as bait. And that there’s no way I should be planning to meet you alone.