Did I do the wrong thing?
Sara let her head fall into her hand. What had she done to Will? She had been stunned into silence, then angered by his non-response, then told him she wanted a salad for dinner. He must be panicking right now. Sara reached into her pocket for her phone. She pulled up the keyboard to text him, but what could she say? There wasn’t an emoji to express what she wanted to do, which was go home, crawl into bed and sleep until all of this was over.
Amanda asked, “Everything okay?”
Sara dialed Will’s number. She listened to the rings.
This time, he answered, “Hello?”
She could hear the rush of road noise. Faith had been in the passenger’s seat of the Mini, which meant that Will was driving, which meant that the call was on speaker.
Sara tried to sound casual. “Hey, babe. I changed my mind about the salad.”
He cleared his throat. She could picture him rubbing his jaw with his fingers, one of his few nervous habits. “Okay.”
Sara could tell that Amanda was hanging on her every word. Faith was probably doing the same with Will, because this was what happened when people kept secrets.
She told Will, “I’ll pick up McDonald’s.”
Will cleared his throat. Sara never offered to pick up McDonald’s because it wasn’t really food. “Okay.”
She said, “I’m—”
Freaked out. Worried. Angry. Hurt. Torn because of Jeffrey but still so deeply, irrevocably in love with you and I’m sorry I don’t know what else to say.
She tried again. “I’ll let you know when I’m on the way.”
He paused a beat. “Okay.”
Sara ended the call. Three okays and she’d probably made things worse. This was exactly why she hated lying or hiding things or whatever bullshit excuse Amanda had given for holding back this information from Sara like she was a child who couldn’t handle the truth about the Easter Bunny.
Nesbitt. Jeffrey. Lena Fucking Adams.
It was Faith’s silence that hurt the most. Sara would just as soon be mad at Amanda for obfuscating as she would be at a snake for hissing. Will had come clean because even an amoeba could be taught to avoid negative stimuli. Faith was her friend. They never talked about Will, but they talked about other things. Serious things, like Faith’s misery as a pregnant fifteen-year-old. Like Sara’s heartbreak when Jeffrey had died. They swapped recipes neither of them would ever try. They gossiped about work. Faith complained about her sex life. Sara babysat Faith’s kid.
Amanda said, “Would you mind rolling down the window? There’s a smell, like—”
“A bloody toilet?” Sara cracked the window just enough to give herself some fresh air. She stared at the blur of trees as they coasted up the highway. Looking at the forest brought her back to that day in the woods. The Viewfinder in her head retrieved the image—Sara on her knees. Jeffrey across from her.
Sara had longed to be held by him, which had felt devastating all over again. The only person she had wanted comfort from was the only person who could not give it. She had ended up calling her sister to meet her at work just to sit with Sara for a few minutes while she’d cried.
Amanda said. “You’re awfully quiet over there.”
“Am I?” The words felt thick in Sara’s mouth.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
Amanda couldn’t afford her thoughts. Sara said, “Those ridges on the side of the road. The ones that make a thumping sound when the tires go over them. What are they called?”
“Rumble strips.”
Sara held her breath before letting it go. “They always remind me of running my fingers down Will’s stomach. His abdominal muscles are so—”
“How about some music?” Amanda’s radio was permanently tuned to the Frank Sinatra station. The speakers purred with a familiar samba—
The girl from Ipanema goes walking …
Sara closed her eyes. Her breathing was too shallow. She felt lightheaded. She forced her respiration to calm. She unclenched her hands in her lap. She let her thoughts fall back into Grant County.
Rebecca Caterino had been found exactly one year and a day after Sara had filed divorce papers at the courthouse. To commemorate the anniversary, Sara had driven into Atlanta to meet a man. He wasn’t a particularly memorable man, but she had told herself that she was going to have fun if it killed her. Then she had drunk too much wine. Then she’d drunk too much whiskey. Then she’d ended up with her head in a toilet.
The next thing she remembered was waking up in her childhood bedroom with a jaw-dropping hangover. Her car was parked in the driveway. Tessa and her father had driven into Atlanta to get her. Sara was not the type of person who ever drank too much. Tessa had teased her over the breakfast table. Eddie had asked her if she’d enjoyed her trip to Barf-A-Lona. Cathy had told her to go help Brock. The only clean clothes Sara could find in her old chest of drawers was a tennis outfit straight out of Sweet Valley High.
“Do you know this one?” Amanda turned up the volume. Sinatra had moved on to “My Kind of Town.” She told Sara, “My father used to sing this to me.”
Sara wasn’t going to traipse down memory lane with Amanda. She had her own memories to wrestle with.
Jeffrey had been a Frank Sinatra kind of man. Respected. Capable. Admired. People naturally wanted to be around him, to follow his lead. Jeffrey had taken it all in stride. He’d gone to Auburn on a football scholarship. He’d graduated with a degree in American History. He’d chosen to be a cop because his mentor was a cop. He’d moved to Grant County because he understood small towns.
Sara could clearly remember the first time she’d seen him. She was volunteering as the team doctor at a high school football game. Jeffrey, the new chief, was glad-handing the crowd. He was a breathtakingly gorgeous man. In her entire life, Sara had never felt such a naked, visceral attraction. She had stared at Jeffrey long enough to do the calculations. Tessa was going to be sleeping with him before the weekend was over.
But Jeffrey had chosen Sara.
From the beginning, she had been all the wrong things with him. Flattered. Completely out of her element. Easy, because she’d slept with him on the first date. Damaged, because Jeffrey was the first man Sara had been with after being brutally raped in Atlanta.
She had told Jeffrey that she’d moved back to Grant County because she wanted to serve a rural community. That was a lie. From the age of thirteen, Sara had been determined to become the top pediatric surgeon in Atlanta. Every spare moment from that point onward had been spent with her head in a textbook or her butt in a desk chair.
Ten minutes in the staff restroom of Grady Hospital had completely derailed her life.
Sara had been handcuffed. She had been silenced. She had been raped. She had been stabbed. She had developed an ectopic pregnancy that robbed her of the ability to have children. Then there was the trial. Then there was the excruciating wait for the verdict, the even more excruciating wait for the sentencing, the move back to Grant County, the establishment of a new career, a new life, a new kind of normal.
Then there was this beautiful, intelligent man who knocked her off her feet.
At first, Sara hadn’t told Jeffrey about the rape because she was waiting for the right moment. Then she’d realized there wasn’t going to be a right moment. The one thing that Jeffrey was most attracted to, the thing that Sara had over most everyone else, was her strength. She couldn’t let him know that she’d been broken. That