She gritted her teeth. Talk about a thing too much, you’re obsessed. Talk about it too little, you’re hiding something. And no such thing as a middle ground. She could never get it right. That perfect balancing act of the right way to speak, to be, to look, to feel, so your innocence could be confirmed. Once you were tainted you could never get clean.
“Is it a first-love thing?” he asked. “The guy who got away?”
“It’s not that,” she said. She busied herself sorting out the cameras and mounting equipment. With only two, they wouldn’t be able to cover the carriage house. They hadn’t even been in there yet. There could be a whole family of serial killers nesting inside.
“Then what is it? Why are you hung up on this guy?” Nathan demanded.
“I’m not hung up on him. I was never…” She ran both her hands through her hair, looking up at the ceiling.
“Who is he to you?” Nathan asked, and she couldn’t escape the feeling that he wanted her to tell him she was still in love with Gabriel. That he wanted there to be something between them. He couldn’t be angry about her parents because that would imply he thought she might have something to do with it, so give him some other sin to hang around her neck, a reason for her to grovel and plead.
“Gabriel wasn’t my boyfriend. His grandmother was my mentor—my art teacher, and she gave me private painting lessons. His dad took off and his grandma was sick, so Gabriel was living with her that year, and we hit it off. I had a schoolgirl crush on him.”
“But he and you never…？” Nathan prompted.
She sighed. “No. I was too young for him, and he wasn’t that kind of guy.” She didn’t want to have to explain how that had been part of the point. Gabriel wasn’t just kind and handsome and funny—he was safe.
“You’re not too young for him now.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I’m not cheating on you, Nathan.”
“I didn’t say you were. You know I trust you.”
She looked away before she said something she regretted.
“Why didn’t your parents want you spending time with him?” Nathan asked. “That was what the police said, right? They didn’t like him.”
“They wouldn’t have wanted me to date him, no,” Emma said. “But it’s not relevant, since we weren’t dating.”
“He was cleared. Gabriel.”
“Yeah,” Emma said.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you not know?” Nathan asked. “They thought you did it together, so don’t you know how they cleared you?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Emma said. “It wasn’t like they gave me a certified letter saying Congrats, you’re innocent. They were just investigating me until at some point they weren’t. Chris stopped hearing from them and eventually the case wasn’t being actively pursued anymore, and that was it.” It had been a long, agonizing period of ambiguity. Every time Chris called, she’d assumed he was telling her she was going to be arrested. But the call never came.
“Why would he stick around after all of that?” Nathan asked. “You got out, why didn’t he?”
“Lorelei won’t go,” Emma said. “That’s the house she lived in with her husband for decades. She told me once that leaving here would be leaving him.”
“Lorelei, that’s his grandmother?”
Emma nodded. “She was an amazing teacher. An amazing artist, too.”
“Right. You said she was your painting teacher,” Nathan said. There was an odd tone to his voice, one that set the hairs on her arms on end, though it was perfectly civil.
“That’s right.”
He gave her an unreadable look. “You never told me you used to paint.”
“Yeah. I did. Is that so strange?” Emma asked, shrugging one shoulder.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen you even doodle a stick figure,” Nathan said.
Emma neatly folded up the plastic bag the cameras had been in and took it over to the trash. “It was all I wanted to do back then. I was going to go to art school.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
“I didn’t even graduate high school, remember?” He’d made such a big deal about it when they were getting to know each other. How interesting her “alternate life path” was. How he respected different ways of finding success. “I needed something that would get me a job right away, and I got a scholarship for a web dev course. And then I guess … I don’t know. You lose a dream and it starts to hurt to even remember you ever had it.”