Dog-eared birthday cards and Christmas cards, tattered notes and mementoes filled the drawer. The sum and substance of the good years with Matt. The years before he had changed and she with him. Before love had degraded and trust had altered. Before he had slipped into that bitter place where she refused to follow.
She tried to recall the first moment she had recognized the difference in their lives, but the change hadn’t happened like that. She couldn’t point her finger at a particular event and say, here is where the end began. It could have begun on the day they wed, really. At the exchange of vows when he became her husband and she his wife. Until death do us part.
Sometimes, though, it seemed death hadn’t followed through with that promise. The scars of those final days, invisible to others, were always present in her mind. Though Matt had gone, the hurt remained like the sting of a phantom limb after removal. Even so, the pain had lessened of late. She had hoped, in time, to find it gone.
Meg frowned down at the box of fading memories. She should have chucked them all in the fire pit in the garden a long time ago. Hell, she should have taken an ax to the kitchen table, too. She told herself her practical nature prevented the latter. Not so. One day she’d hoped for an answer to the words he’d carved into the wooden surface.
So much for hope. So much for answers.
She gazed a moment longer at the drawer across her knees and then rose. Marching to the kitchen with it balanced against her hip, she paused only long enough to shove her feet into a pair of rubber boots and grab the box of matches before heading out into the night. Once there, she made her way to the garden. Meg dropped to her knees beside the fire pit and removed the lid. Grabbing a handful of items from the drawer, she hesitated briefly before spreading them over the metal bottom of the receptacle. Inhaling, she struck a match against the side of the box and set fire to the floral border of a card.
Meg watched the edges blacken and curl, flame moving across the decorated surface of the birthday card, consuming paper in a relentless crawl. She fed in another and then more of the drawer’s contents, one item at a time, until nothing remained. Eyes surprisingly dry, Meg stood, the empty drawer dangling from her left hand against her thigh. Sparks drifted skyward, vivid against the darkness beyond until they faded to ash and disappeared.
She returned the mesh top to the pit and turned away. Somehow, she had expected to feel better about what she had done. Numbness tingled across her skin, touched her mind, and nothing more. Before going back inside, Meg glanced up at the ocean-facing windows of her bedroom, of the bedroom she and Matt once shared. Starlight shimmered across the glass surfaces, reflecting the velvet night sky.
In the nearest, a shadow moved and the curtain dropped back into place.
Chapter 4
Meg raced up the back stairs to the second floor in her unfastened rubber boots, stumbling at the top. She continued down the hall to her bedroom, and once inside, switched on the light.
The sash of the window where she thought she’d seen Caleb was raised several inches, the curtain fluttering slightly in a draft of air. Right. She’d forgotten she’d opened it. She really didn’t believe Caleb would have wandered into her room, anyway, although if he had still been awake, he could have spotted the glow of the flames from the hallway and come to investigate.
Stepping back into the corridor, Meg listened. After a moment, she slipped out of the clumsy boots and strode toward the guest room. She paused outside the closed door. After turning the knob, Meg eased the door open and peered inside. Revealed in shadow and light, Caleb lay on his back, one arm flung above his head, jaw slack, mouth open with the growl of steady respiration passing in and out of his lungs.
Leaving the door slightly ajar, Meg returned to her room, the jolt of alarm fading, and in its place was a certain bemusement as she thought of Caleb asleep in his bed. It hadn’t taken him long to slip back into slumber. Not surprising, considering his ordeal. She pictured the blankets twisted about his hips, his naked chest rising and falling with each breath. A beautifully made man, Caleb Hunter. She needed to forget that and sleep, too. The therapeutic effect of burning the drawer’s contents should help. Yet, she didn’t think it would.
Meg climbed into her bed and pulled the blankets to her chin as she stretched out on the sheet. Lying on her back, she watched the pattern of reflected starlight move across the ceiling for one hour, then into the next, listening to the sound of Caleb breathing across the hall where he slept soundly, cramped in the narrow iron bed. She told herself she had left his door ajar in order to hear him if he became restless or distressed. She told herself that as if it were true. Foolish, foolish, foolish, on so many levels.
What inhabited the night to change one’s perspective? What was it about the closing of the day, the shadowed places, and the hushed quality of sound that made a difference? What, in the small hours of the morning, made loneliness more prevalent, made desire seem reasonable, made memory less bearable than the alternative…well, despite the pain memory brought. She wouldn’t want to be in Caleb’s position, without a past to recall.
Loneliness had become her companion, but not a pleasant one. Familiar, yes, comfortable, yes, but never comforting. Rolling onto her side, Meg punched the pillow with her fist several times before lowering her head back onto the cool surface.
The anniversary of Matt’s death and she yearned for a stranger. A stranger she had dreamed about, but a stranger nonetheless. She had as little idea of whom and what he was as he did. Only a matter of a few hours old, the connection between them had no basis on anything practical or proven.
Sitting across from him at dinner, her eyes had strayed to his left hand. Usually, if a man wore a wedding band, some indication of its existence would show even if the ring of gold had gone, like an absence of tan line, a thinning of the flesh, a certain type of callous, something. But she detected none of those giveaways. The lack didn’t preclude marriage, naturally, as he could have been one of those men who didn’t wear a ring due to the hazards of his particular occupation. His hands certainly had the appearance of immoderate use.
What did he do for a living? At this point, who might be looking for him to return to his desk, his tractor, his ship? Could a child or children exist somewhere, a wife wondering what she had done to make him leave her, waiting in vain for him to walk in the door?
Meg closed her eyes, blotting out that picture. She knew he had no wife. Or she had at least become adept at convincing herself he had no wife, as the dark magic of the night constructed its web. With a snort of derision, she rolled to her other side, chiding herself for her weakness, her desperate loneliness on the anniversary of Matt’s demise. She wanted comfort and physical closeness, and something about Caleb Hunter made her want him to fill that void. Maybe her good buddy, loneliness, had pushed her off the deep end.
But she knew better.
Damn it.
Settling herself, she listened to the sounds of the house. Wind rattled the glass and ruffled the chimes on the porch into musical annotation. Wood creaked, not from the pressure of a body’s weight advancing across the planked floor—even though her mind had leaped to that conclusion in a heated rush—but from the contracting of cooling timbers in the weathered Victorian frame. In the front hall below, the grandfather clock ticked its metronomic rhythm. Hot water clicked through expanding pipes. Far from silent, yet the palpable emptiness of the house settled like a weight on her chest.
But it wasn’t empty. It had never been. She was someone. And now there was another someone within its walls as well.
Someone with no memory of the specifics of his own life, but what did that matter? His injuries were not life threatening, no continued swelling, no headache, nausea, blurred vision, or slurred speech. He wanted somewhere safe for a time until he remembered things besides his name