The first thing she detected was how much the place had retained its identity over the past decades, and the countless details he’d sketched in the interview room. The elephant-sized boulder still nudged the shoreline, though cattails now led the way into the water. Behind the big stone, the cliff caught the late-morning sunshine, while willows and shaggy shrubs ascended the rock-embedded bank to the ledge that housed an immense eagles’ nest. From this angle, Meg had always thought it resembled one of those behemoth ladies’ hats popular in the 1920s.
“That thing must weigh a ton,” she remarked, staring up eighty feet. “Do they still come back every spring?”
From under the bill of his ball cap, his eyes were mystic. “It’s not the same pair, Meggie.”
That had been here when they were teenagers. Kissing on that rock.
“Of course not. I was just wondering if this spring’s pair returned the way the others did.”
“The nest was empty for a lot of years with the shooting range so near. This spring is the first I saw a pair return to nest.”
“I’m sorry, Ethan. I know how much you loved the eagles.”
His eyes were fathomless under the cap’s visor. “So did you.”
She had. As teenagers, they’d hidden among the trees and between kisses observed the birds with telescopes and binoculars, recording hatching times and feeding times and behaviors of both parents and young.
Taking a swig of her water, Meg stepped toward the boulder. “Show me where you found the injured bird.”
They went through the procedure step by step, she clicking pictures and rewriting the statement, he describing again what he’d discovered, where he had spotted her son and Randy Leland shooting at the deadwood along the shore. She snapped close-ups of the splinters in the driftwood, then of the twenty-two shells strewn among the rocks.
When it was done she presented the statement of his verbal explanation. “Mind reading it over, ensure it’s correct?” She pointed below the last paragraph. “Sign at the X.”
He reached over, slashed his name across the bottom of the last page.
“You’re not reading it?” She had expected him to examine every nuance of what she’d written.
He pushed the notebook more securely into her hands. “I trust you, Meggie.”
How could she respond to that? Trust was not something she expected from men. Ethan hadn’t trusted her in the past when she’d needed him after the death of her best friend Farrah, and Doug hadn’t trusted Meg’s oscillating emotions after her surgery, and Mark, the man she’d dated four years ago…He had understood even less than Doug or Ethan.
“Call me Meg,” she said, focusing on the present, the tangible, the necessary, hoping annoyance would set in so she could have an excuse to leave. “I don’t go by Meggie anymore.”
He tilted back his head, took a swallow of water, eyeing her all the time. As he recapped the bottle, his mouth twitched. “You’ll always be Meggie to me. Meg is the cop. Meggie is the woman.”
A spear of heat pricked her stomach. She turned to go. “They’re one and the same. I’m not the person you knew back then, Ethan.”
His biceps brushed her shoulder as he fell in step beside her. “Can’t promise to remember that.”
“Well, try. By the way, thanks for coming here with me.” For giving me a statement I can file.
“I don’t think your son shot the eagle.”
“That remains to be seen. He’s been—” She cut off the direction of thought. Ethan Red Wolf was no longer part of her life, and she had no business burdening him with her woes about a teenager dipping his toes in dark waters.
“Been what?” Ethan prompted. His stride slowed to match hers across the uneven, tricky landscape.
She paused in the cool shadows bordering the timberline. Across the water a loon bugled its lonesome call. “Let’s just say Beau has a rebellious streak.”
“Normal for teenagers.” The flicker of fun resurfaced. “I recall us having a streak of rebelliousness when we were sixteen.”
“We weren’t irresponsible,” she retorted. We didn’t flick cigarettes out car windows or write graffiti on the sides of buildings. “If we had, our parents would’ve kicked butt.”
Beneath the cap, his eyes laughed. “Oh, Meggie. You forget so easily. What about the time we did doughnut spins in my old truck across old man Freeley’s hay field? And the time you drove your dad’s pickup to the drive-in without permission. He sent the cops looking for us.”
Her lips pursed to hide a smile. “That was different.”
“How so?”
“We did it for fun. Beau’s got ten miles of attitude. He does things with intent.”
Ethan frowned. “You’re talking like a cop, not a mother.”
“Maybe I can’t separate the two.”
“Like you can’t separate the cop from the woman?”
She walked away from him, into the forest. “This conversation’s over.”
“Why, because I hit a nerve?”
“Because my relationship with Beau is none of your concern.”
“What about the relationship between you and me?” he called.
“A two-hour reunion isn’t a relationship.”
Several seconds later his fingers closed around her forearm. A pinch of fear rushed through Meg. He’d come up behind her, quick and silent, and they were on a mountainside, but most of all she had no tool of comparison for this somber-eyed Ethan to the one she’d suppressed in the memories of her past.
Scowling, he released his grip and stepped back. “Christ, Meggie. You know I’d never hurt you.”
Shame warmed her cheeks. He always could read her emotions. “It’s not that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Look, this is my point. We no longer know each other.”
“We have a history,” he argued. “A long history. Which you chose to throw away by running off and marrying some other man.”
“I did not run off or throw away anything. You chose not to understand.”
“I understood full well. Your best friend committed suicide six days before prom night and you were so distraught all you wanted was to eradicate the memory. ‘Please, Ethan,’ you begged. ‘Help me erase the memory. Give me something else to put in its place.’ Well, sorry for not having the enthusiasm to take your virginity just so you could grab what I thought should be a sweet and tender first time for both of us, just to use it as a crutch in your grief. I loved you, Meggie. Didn’t that mean anything to you?”
From a far distance in her mind, the up-and-down motion of his chest registered. He breathed as if he’d sprinted a mile uphill. Resurrected, that night still bothered him.
Suddenly, she saw herself as he had. Walking away, crying and cursing him in the same breath. Without empathy for his broken heart, his gentle soul. Farrah had been his friend, too—along with Kell Tanner. Four kids growing up together. “Buds all the way,” they’d repeated on a thousand and one occasions, like a mantra.
Until Farrah made them a trio and life as they knew it died at the end of a rope in that closet with her.
As Meg stood looking up at Ethan, she remembered,