Did you take it? I’d asked, picturing Ruby standing against a cinder-block wall, one hand over her other ear.
He shook his head and looked up at me. Did I do the right thing? he’d asked. And I got it suddenly. Him. The way Ruby had chased after this feeling, on and off, for years. The way he looked up from the seat at my kitchen table, the puppy-dog gleam in his eye. The way his words felt raw and honest, like he was confessing something deeper. The gently lilting drawl that pulled you in. The way he deferred to my judgment, to my opinion—it was its own brand of power.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. You did the right thing, I had told him.
Well, I feel like an asshole. Head in his hand, twisting the bottle of beer back and forth on the tabletop.
Twenty years is a long time, I told him, as if absolving us both of what was still to come.
There’s also the double homicide to consider, he’d said, one side of his mouth raised in that private smile I’d come to know better. It was the first time anyone could, or would, make a joke. I had laughed, loud and unrestrained, more than was warranted. An emotion that had been bottled up. I hadn’t laughed since before we’d found the Truetts’ bodies. As if everything since then had been tamped down with a heavy weight. And now that it had been released, I assigned it disproportionate significance.
But everything back then was raw emotion. The fear, the loyalty, the shame. Everything felt so raw and exposed that it was easy to think: So what? What’s a little more?
So when he said, We weren’t that serious. I mean, you know that. We never were, I could answer: I know.
I knew roughly how it would go after that, had watched the same routine with Ruby. The way he called her kiddo, the way he skirted around her, stayed in her orbit, always making sure she was turned to him, following.
He’d stood and placed the empty beer behind me on the sink, leaning close. I needed that, he said. I was no longer sure what he was referring to, and I no longer cared.
* * *
BEFORE MAC, BEFORE THE trial, before the sound of the engine humming too long in the garage next door, I had often felt like I was standing on the edge of something, looking down, always careful not to get too close. Growing up with my brother, I had always felt the pull toward the other extreme. Like I was fighting to maintain a delicate balance; like any slip would send the rest of our family into a spiral. I’d believed strongly in the necessity of control—for myself and for others. I’d spent my entire life staying within the confines I’d established for myself or the boundaries others had set for me.
What would happen, I’d suddenly thought, if I breached those confines? If I did not pull back but leaned forward instead, giving in to the impulse and recklessness of the moment?
The answer, it turned out, was both relieving and terrifying: nothing. There was no repercussion, no slide I’d set in motion, and there was something alluring about that realization.
But now, as Mac stood beside me, it felt more dangerous, more deliberate. Back then, what was the harm? There was no fear in being found out, no consequence we would have to face—other than the side-eye from Tate, the knowing look from Preston. It had felt justified, even. Two people who could understand each other. Whose lives had been shaken by proximity to Ruby Fletcher.
Things had been easy and simple with Mac. We weren’t serious, either. We were a convenience. I couldn’t imagine Mac ever being serious about anything. Whatever we had then had dissipated by winter vacation, only to start up again early last month—some Pavlovian response to the changing seasons.
Mac placed the beer bottle on the counter, standing closer. The room felt charged, like he was testing me, but in some game—something elicit, something exciting. A rush. Like he was waiting for Ruby to catch us.
“Wait,” I said. Because the decisions weren’t as easy to make when there wasn’t a twenty-year buffer and cinder-block walls between us. Then I thought, So what if she found me? What would she do? Leave? Would that really be the worst thing?
I didn’t put up much of a fight when Mac leaned in, his mouth on my neck. But he must’ve felt my resistance. “Don’t let her get to you, Harper,” he said, breath next to my ear, body pressing mine into the counter. “Are you afraid?”
“No,” I said, even though I was listening for a car, watching the front entrance. But the thing I’d learned about fear was that it heightened everything, even this. It solidified whom you trusted and whom you didn’t. It clarified things—about others, about ourselves.