“Yeah, and it scares the hell out of me. I have tried to understand, but I can’t let you do this, Scarlet. It’s reckless.” For the first time, his tone was firm.
My face burned. “You don’t get to tell me what to do just because we f**ked in the yard.”
He was surprised by my reaction, but the only thing he did in response was frown. “Don’t do that.”
That caught me off guard. Andrew had always been so quick to come back at me with angry words that I wasn’t prepared to resume a picked fight with someone who stayed calm. “Then don’t tell me what to do.”
He gently grabbed my hand and kissed my palm. I tried to pull away, but he held on to it. “I can’t begin to know what you go through every day waiting for your girls. I’ve never met them, and I’m worried sick about them. You can push me away all day long, but I’m in love with you. I love you, Scarlet, and it would destroy me if anything happened to you.”
For just a moment, I let guilt seep in with his words. In that moment, I thought about staying there, with him, where it was safe. I thought about waiting for the girls, so I could be sure to be at the ranch waiting when they arrived. But then I thought about Jenna and Halle walking past Shallot, and running into a herd. Even a small one would be a death sentence. They were just little girls. I couldn’t be sure that Andrew was with them to protect them or help them make decisions.
“I can’t,” I said, wriggling my hand free of his.
“You can’t what?”
“Do this. It’s breaking my focus.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I need to worry about them, Nathan. I need to stand outside and think about them and worry about them every second of the day, because I’m afraid if I don’t something will happen to them.”
He shook his head again. He was clearly confused by my babbling.
“I know it’s irrational, okay? I can see it on your face and I can feel it everywhere but in my heart. Thinking about them keeps them alive.”
“Okay. I get that, but worrying about them is one thing. Making dangerous choices is—”
“This is distracting me. You are distracting me. I don’t think about them as much anymore. Sometimes I think about you, or Zoe or . . . I can’t care about you. It makes me forget what I need to do to get Jenna and Halle home. I can’t be responsible for your feelings. My children come first. They will always come first.”
“Of course. They should, but—”
“So you understand that I can’t do this. With you . . . I can’t.”
“Scarlet,” he said, reaching out for me. His voice was tinged with desperation. “Just . . . let’s think of another way. There has to be another way.”
“But there isn’t.”
Nathan stood with his lips parted, breathing uneven, trying to think of something, anything to get me to change my mind, from both decisions. He looked down to the floor, searching the darkness for words. “I can’t go with you. I have to stay with Zoe, I . . .”
“I know.”
His eyes met mine. His desperation was discernible even in the dark. “I’ll think about them with you.”
Damn him. Damn him and his decency. It made me want to admit to loving him back, but I couldn’t. Letting myself care about his feelings got in the way of what I knew I needed to do to get my girls safely to the ranch. “It’s the last shred of sanity I have, Nathan. Don’t take it from me.”
I walked away from him quickly, and then jogged down the basement steps. I didn’t know if he was still standing in the living room, stunned, pissed, confused, or disgusted. I didn’t dare look back.
We left Red Hill at first light. We would spend all day in Shallot and still not make a dent in teds there, so I wanted to leave as soon as it was safe. Nathan jumped out of bed and waved good-bye as soon as he heard the front door open, but he didn’t speak or kiss me good-bye.
We were to the highway within an hour, but getting to Shallot, clearing, and getting back before dark was going to take serious effort. I set the pace at a slow jog. After forty minutes, Cooper seemed to pick up the pace, but mine was more like a fast walk. We were all carrying packs, but Cooper was unfazed, which kind of pissed me off. I was in good shape for my age. I ran . . . sometimes. I walked all over the damn hospital, some days without a lunch or even sitting down. I figured the jaunt to Shallot would be work, but I was forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other, and we weren’t halfway there yet.
“I’ve got to rest,” I said, stopping.
“Whose idea was it to walk?” Joey smiled.
“We all agreed,” I said. “We would only use the vehicles in case of an emergency exit.”
“You look like an emergency to me,” Joey said, still smiling.
I peered up at him with the threat of wrath in my eyes. “Shut up.”
“We won’t make it back by dark if we rest,” Cooper called back.
“If we keep pushing like this, we’ll all be too tired to clear,” Bryce said. “We might just have to find somewhere to hole up for the night.”
“In Shallot?” I said, grabbing my knees. I stood up and made myself take the first step. “Didn’t you say some of your people got killed there?”
“Some of Nathan’s people,” Joey said.
I nodded, but didn’t say anything else. We alternated walking and jogging, until finally I saw that damn car in the middle of the highway. The alarm had been silenced, or the car battery had died. The teds were gone.
The tire tracks from the Jeep were still rutted in the field on the other side. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since that day. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll go in slow. Stay together.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nathan
By late afternoon, I caught myself glancing at the crest of the field or the road every time I passed the front door. By dinner, I had to work to conceal my worry. Ashley’s anxious comments every five minutes didn’t help anything, but when Zoe mentioned that it would be dark soon, truth began to creep in.
“They should be here by now,” Elleny said in a quiet but anxious voice. “They wouldn’t walk in the dark, w-would they? The sun has already set.”
Ashley sat down at the table and closed her eyes. “They’ll be back, Elleny, don’t worry. They couldn’t have all been hurt. If something happened, some of them would still come back. So you know what that means? They’re all fine.”