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“I got a nasty phone call earlier,” she said slowly.
He nodded. “I didn’t think it was a funny one.”
“No.” Of course not. And now she was sounding like an idiot, she supposed. She gathered herself, trying to organize her words carefully. “Gage just wanted me to know that several other women received similar calls.”
One of his eyebrows lifted. “Really.”
“Probably just kids.”
“Maybe.”
His response didn’t seem to make sense. “Maybe?”
“Well, that would depend, wouldn’t it?”
“On what?”
“On what has you so scared, and who else received the calls.”
“What in the world do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Life has made me suspicious.”
“Oh.” She bit her lower lip, realizing that nothing in her life had prepared her for dealing with a man like this. He seemed to come at things from a unique direction, unlike anything she was familiar with.
He started to turn away. “Well, as long as you’re okay …”
He didn’t ask a single question. She found that intriguing, given what little he had figured out about her in the short time since he moved in. Any other person would have been asking dozens of question, but this man just seemed to accept that she was afraid, she must have good reason for it and that it was none of his business.
In that moment she thought it possible that she might come to like him.
“Wade?”
He stopped and turned back to her. He didn’t say a word, simply looked at her.
“I, uh …” How could she say that she didn’t want to be alone? That she was tired of being locked in the prison of her own thoughts? That even though solitude had provided her only safety for a year now, she was sick of it, and sick of her own company. Tired enough of it all to feel an impulse toward risk. Just a small risk.
“Should I make coffee?” he asked.
He had understood, though how she couldn’t imagine. She might have been about to ask him anything, tell him anything.
All she said was, “Thanks.” Because there was nothing else she could say.
She switched the TV off so she could listen to his movements in the kitchen. Everything he needed was beside the drip coffeemaker, so he wouldn’t have trouble finding it. And finally she could afford to have more than one cup each day. Imagine that, being reduced to one cup of coffee and a can of soup each day.
Sure, there were plenty of people in the world who had less, but her life had never before been restricted in such a way. She’d always been luckier than that. Always. Until recently.
Wade returned finally with two mugs, hers with exactly the right milkiness. The man missed nothing. Nothing.
He sat across from her on the easy chair, sipping his own coffee, watchful but silent. Maybe this wasn’t going to work at all. How did you converse with a block of stone? But she needed something, anything, to break the cycle of her own thoughts.
Man, she didn’t even know how to start a conversation anymore! Once it had come as naturally as breathing to her, but now, after a year of guarding every word that issued from her mouth, she had lost the ability it seemed.
Wade sipped his coffee again. He, at least, seemed comfortable with silence. After a couple of awkward minutes, however, he surprised her by speaking.
“Do you know Seth Hardin?”
She shook her head. “I know his father, but I’ve never met Seth.”
“He’s a great guy. I worked with him a lot over the years. He’s the one who recommended I come here.”
Positively voluble all of a sudden. “Why?”
He gave a small shrug. “He thought it would be peaceful for me.”
At that a laugh escaped her, almost hysterical, and she broke it off sharply. “Sorry. Then you walk into this, a crazy widow who collapses over a prank phone call. Some peace.”
His obsidian eyes regarded her steadily, but not judgmentally. “Fear like yours doesn’t happen without a good reason.”
It could have been a question, but clearly it was not. This man wouldn’t push her in any way. Not even one so obvious and natural. She sought for a way to continue. “Gage said you were in the navy.”
He nodded. “For more than half my life.”
“Wow.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Yeah.” Short, brief. After another moment he stirred. “You need to talk.”
She tensed immediately. Was he trying to get her to explain? But then he spoke again, easing her concern.
“I’m not a talker.” Another small shrug. “Never was. Making conversation is one of the many things I’m not good at.”
“Me, either, anymore. I wasn’t always that way.”
He nodded. “Some things in life make it harder. I’m not sure I ever had the gift.”
“Maybe it’s not a gift,” she said impulsively. “Maybe most of what we say is pointless, just background noise.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s how we start making connections. I stopped making them a long time ago.”
“Why?”
He looked down into his mug, and she waited while he decided what he wanted to say, and probably what he didn’t.
“Connections,” he said finally, “can have a high price.”
Man, didn’t she know that. Maybe that was part of the reason she’d kept so much to herself over the past year, not simply because she was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Maybe it was because she feared caring ever again.
“I can understand that,” she agreed, her lips feeling oddly numb. As if she were falling away again, from now into memory. But her memory had become a Pandora’s box, and she struggled to cling to the moment. To now.
The phone rang again. She jumped and stared at it. Gage had already called. Work? Maybe. Maybe not.
Wade spoke. “Want me to answer it?”
A kind offer, but one that wouldn’t help her deal with reality. She’d been protected almost into nonexistence, she realized. Protected and frightened. At some point she had to start living again, not just existing.
So she reached for the phone, even as her heart hammered and her hand shook. “Hello?”
“Cory!” A familiar woman’s voice filled her ear. “It’s Marsha.” Marsha from work, a woman she occasionally spent a little time with because they had some similarities, some points of connection they could talk about. But they’d never really gotten to the point of random, friendly phone calls.
“Hi, Marsha. What’s up?” Her heart slowed, her hand steadied.
“I got a phone call. I think Jack has found me!”
Cory drew a sharp breath. While she hadn’t shared her story with Marsha, she’d learned a lot of Marsha’s story over the past year. “What makes you think that?”
“The person said he knew where I was!”
“Oh. Marsha, I got one of those calls, too. Did you report it to the sheriff?”
“A phone call like that?” Marsha laughed, but there was an edge to it. “Why would he even listen to me?”
“Because I got one of those calls. And a few other women did, too.”
Marsha fell silent. Then hopefully, “Others got the same call?”
“Gage thinks it was a prank. I reported it and so did some others.”
In the silence on the line, Cory could hear Marsha start calming herself. She waited patiently until she could no longer hear Marsha’s rapid breathing. Then she asked, “Do you want to come over?” She’d never asked that before, even though she’d gone to Marsha’s a few times. Explaining expensive alarm systems could get … messy, and involve lying.
“No. No. I guess not. If Gage thinks it’s a prank, and I’m not the only one to get a call, I must be okay.”
“So it would seem.”
“But I’m going to get a dog,” Marsha said with sudden determination. “Tomorrow, I’m getting a dog. A big one that barks.” Then she gave a tinny laugh.
“If it helps you to feel safer.”
“It’ll help. And if I’m this nervous after all this time, I guess I need the help. Want to do coffee in the morning?”
That meant going out, and Gage had told her not to. But that had been before he decided the calls were a prank. Cory hesitated, then said, “Let me call you about that in the morning.”
“Okay. Maybe you can help me pick out a dog.”
As if she knew anything about dogs. “I’ll call around nine, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks, Cory. I feel a lot better now.”
When Cory hung up, she found Wade sipping his coffee, quietly attentive. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided to explain.
“My friend Marsha. She got one of those calls, too.”
“Why did it frighten her?”
“Her ex was abusive. Very abusive. She’s afraid he might find her.”
He nodded slowly. “So she’s hiding here, too?”
“Too?” She didn’t want to think about what his use of that word meant, how much he must have figured out about her.
He said nothing, just took another sip of coffee. Then, at last, “What did the caller say?”
“Just ‘I know where you are.’”
Another nod. “That would be scary to someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
And she’d just revealed a whole hell of a lot. She ought to panic, but somehow the panic wouldn’t come. Maybe because having listened to Marsha, some steely chord in her had been plucked, one long forgotten. Prank call or not, at least two women were going to have trouble sleeping tonight, and that made her mad.
“Why would some idiot do this?” she demanded. “I don’t care if it was kids. This isn’t funny. Not at all.”
“I agree.”
His agreement, far from settling her, pushed her into a rare contrarian mood. She knew kids, after all, had taught them for years. “They don’t think,” she said. “They probably got the idea from some movie and are having a grand old time laughing that they might have scared someone.”
“Maybe.”
“They wouldn’t realize that some people might really have something to fear.”
“Maybe.”
She looked at him in frustration. “Can you manage more than a few syllables?”
At that he almost smiled. She could see the crack in his stone facade. “Occasionally,” he said. “How many syllables do you want?”
“Just tell me why you keep saying maybe.”
“I told you, I’m suspicious by nature. Tell me more about your friend Marsha.”
“Why? What? I told you her story, basically.”
He set his cup on the end table and leaned toward her, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands. “Try this. Have you both always lived here or did you move here? Are you about the same age? Any similarities in appearance?”
Just as she started to think he had gone over some kind of edge, something else struck her. For a few seconds she couldn’t find breath to speak, and when she did it was a mere whisper. “You think someone could be trying to find one of us?”
“I don’t know.” The words came out bluntly. “A sample of two hardly proves anything. But I’m still curious. Will you tell me?”
She hesitated, then finally nodded. “Marsha and I are sort of friends because we … share a few things. We both moved here within a couple of weeks of each other, almost a year ago. We work together at the grocery.”
“Your ages? And your appearance?”
