Page 40 of Lost With You
She pulled her legs up, drawing even tighter into herself.
“Let’s hope we don’t hear an eastern screech owl.” He clutched his water bottle just to hold something against the regret. “It’s terrifying. It sounds like a child screaming in agony—”
“It’s not getting lost that unnerves me,” she interrupted.
He stopped his words but didn’t close his mouth.
“It’s not even the uncertainty,” she added, “of where we’re going.”
Questions gathered, choking him, but the cup trembled in her hand.
“It’s all the backtracking.” She dropped one hand to her side and traced a pattern in the pine needles. “All the walking in circles. The lack of forward progress is what kills me. I don’t like being…stuck in place.”
Not in a million years would he have guessed that. A fly whined in his ear, but he didn’t wave it away, not wanting any motion to distract her from the words she seemed so reluctant to say.
“I didn’t always live in my van.” She slid the coffee cup beside her and then embraced her knees, drawing them tight to her chest. “I had a home once. I knew the creak of every floorboard. I could set my clock to the sound of my neighbor’s lawn mower, nine in the morning every Saturday in the summer. Whenever I went up into the attic, I tracked the way the beams sweated resin, gooey little balls pressed out of the wood. I bound myself, every day, to the life in that house and the dreams I had and the world that I made so familiar.”
He ventured, “You loved it.”
“I did.” She pressed her chin between her knees. “I loved it…until my fiancé died.”
He heard many words, but they tangled in his head. He struggled to put them together, but they kept scrambling. She had mentioned a fiancé once, but not a loss. That ruffled up so many questions, so many conflicting emotions. Surprise and regret and sympathy and confusion and even a twinge of jealousy that he hadn’t earned the right to feel. Casey had loved another man. Of course she had. But it shouldn’t matter because the relationship was in the past when she didn’t yet belong to him.
Belong?
“Ian’s death was sudden.” She lifted her face, jaw tight. “He’s been gone nearly three years now. It doesn’t seem real, and yet it’s so very, very real. I think about him still. But when I do, I think less about Ian and more about the life we both built, the life we both lost.”
Dylan nodded, because this he understood. Back at his college reunion, along with Logan and Garrick, he’d walked the rugby field until the wee hours of the morning, talking about loved ones lost, or soon to be.
“My parents are gone, too.” She wiped a cheek like she was brushing away a fly, but he knew better. “I lost them when I was barely out of my teens. Then I lost another family when Ian died.”
His heart squeezed. He couldn’t imagine. His family, as annoying as they could be, were the center of his life. He couldn’t imagine a world without them.
“Grief is a strange thing.” Her throat flexed as she lifted her chin from her knees. “Some people cling to every piece of clothing, to every memory. They become hoarders of an old life.” She glanced up past the canopy of the trees toward the velvet-black sky. “But I fled in the opposite direction. When Ian died, I gave everything up.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She felt like an egg cracked open. She hadn’t talked about her past to anyone except her sister and Jillian. Hell, Casey hadn’t even thought about that old Victorian fixer-upper that she and Ian had bought, or even Ian’s sweet, nerdy face, not for a while. She’d urged those memories to recede through the van’s back window when she’d last driven away from the house.
“I wish I had the right words, Casey, but I know there aren’t any.”
She hugged her legs tighter, glad he didn’t say,I’m sorry. She remembered flinching at the apology every time the words had been spoken during the wake and funeral, when she watched her high school sweetheart lowered into the ground along with every plan they’d made for the future.
She smoothed her face against the old, familiar pain. “It was a terrible tragedy. A car accident. Random chaos.”
There they were, Jillian’s words, coming out of her own mouth, just like Jillian said they someday would. Jillian had insisted that Casey shouldn’t feel guilty for being alive, that random chaos couldn’t be controlled. But certainly it could. Life could be controlled. But only if she reduced that life to what could fit into the back of a minivan. Only if she kept her grip firm on the steering wheel and kept moving.
She said, “I talk to someone regularly about all this.” The stab in her heart dug a little deeper. “By phone, because with my life, I never know where I’ll be from week to week. Jillian—my therapist—keeps me honest.”
He murmured, “And yet you’re still living out of a van.”
“I stay with my sister about once a month.” She shrugged. “It’s my prescribed dose of domesticity.”
It ached every time, sleeping in her sister’s guest room on a bed of ruffled sheets, listening to the giggles of her nieces as they raced down to breakfast in the morning. She fixed her gaze on the center of the fire, rocking a little, feeling more exposed than she ever had, even lying bare next to Dylan inside that sleeping bag.
“Here,” Dylan said, holding a candy bar out to her. “Take it.”
She hadn’t heard Dylan rifle through his pack, but she reached blindly for the chocolate he offered. The bar was wide and smooth and heavy…and, she suddenly realized, not chocolate at all. Firelight gleamed off a glassy screen.
