Shadowlands (Shadowlands 1)

After a long moment, I heard my dad sigh. I looked up, one tear spilling free, and he gazed back at me. His eyes were heavy and sad. His posture curled. For the first time in a long time, he looked sorry.

“I’m just gonna go to bed,” I said quietl

y.

He sank down on the stairs, as if the air had been let out of him. By the time I slipped past him, he had his face buried in his hands. I thought of what I’d heard last night, him sobbing alone in his room, and my heart went out to him.

“G’night, Dad,” I said, realizing I hadn’t said it in an impossibly long time.

He didn’t reply at first, but when I got to the top of the stairs, he turned and looked up at me, tears shining in his eyes.

“Good night, Rory.”

This island was not stingy with its gifts. The fog. The fantastic fog. Its blinding quality was so complete. So utterly encompassing. It was like nothing he’d ever seen or heard of or read about, but it was lovely. It was empowering.

He’d been so close to her tonight. So very, very close. He’d tasted her fear again, so sweet and salty. It was all he could do to keep from reaching out and plucking a strand of that hair for himself. To taste it again. To own it. The possibility was almost too much to bear.

But now was not the time. He had already set his plot in motion and could not risk it now. This time, everything was going to happen as planned. This time, nothing and no one would stop him. This time, she would be his.

My thigh muscles were on fire, and my calves were cramping. There was a blister forming on the side of my big toe, and sweat soaked the back of my gray T-shirt. My lungs burned, my eyes watered, and my neck itched whenever my hair brushed against it.

I was in heaven. Why had I waited so long to do this?

As I came around a bend in the trail, the top of the bluff loomed into view. For the first mile, Olive had kept pace with me, panting at my side. After that, she’d dropped back, and now there was nothing but the crashing surf and whipping wind. I hoped she was okay, because I was not about to stop. This was way too much fun. Imagining the finish line up ahead, I turned on the heat and pushed myself into a sprint for the last incline. As soon as I reached the top, I let out a triumphant, euphoric laugh. I slowed my steps to a walk and held my fingers to my neck to check my pulse.

Perfect. Everything, at this moment, was perfect. I decided to relish it. Relish the sun on my face, the clean air whooshing in and out of my lungs, that lovely floral scent all around me. I wasn’t going to think about the weird gray house or the scrap of fabric or the whispers, the laughing, or the humming. I wasn’t even going to ponder the fact that Darcy had refused to take me seriously last night, or that my dad hadn’t come out of his room this morning. I was just going to stand here and breathe.

Just beneath me on the hill was a small outcropping with a pretty white gazebo at its center, and farther below I could see the roof of our house on Magnolia Street. Beyond that, the ocean went on forever. I reached my arms over my head and stretched.

My mother would have loved this place. She lived for the beach, for quaint little shopping towns. The gardens here would have had her falling over with envy, and I could just imagine her peppering the locals with questions about how they got their tulips to bloom so late in the season and whether her roses needed more or less pruning. I felt a pang of sadness, wishing she were here in this place that seemed tailor-made for her, and did my best to brush it aside. Those pangs were part of my life now—they would be forever—and while I sometimes let myself wallow in them, this was not one of those times. Not when I was trying to appreciate the perfect.

To my left, a thin, paved walkway cut into the grass, which eventually broke off in two directions. One led right to the big blue house Darcy had noticed yesterday, the other toward the street where it turned into a wide sidewalk. I walked over to a bench situated right at the fork in the path and set myself up behind it for a calf stretch while I waited for Olive. As soon as I turned my back to the house, I felt a chill as if someone was watching me and glanced over my shoulder. The hanging plants swung in the breeze, and the weathervane atop the roof held a position of due south. Otherwise, the place was still.

“God, you weren’t kidding when you said you were a runner!” Olive said between gasps when she finally joined me a good five minutes later. She dropped down onto the bench and put her head between her knees. Her long-sleeved gray-and-black striped T-shirt was saturated with sweat. “You’re wicked fast.”

“Eh, I’m a solid third-placer,” I said, lifting one shoulder.

Her eyes went wide. “Third place? Do the people who come in first have wings on their feet?”

I laughed and reached back to grab my ankle to stretch my quads. “So I guess you’ve decided running’s not your thing?”

“Not even a little bit,” Olive said, holding her hand to her heart as she tried to regulate her breathing.

I gave her a wry smile. “Well, thanks, anyway, for getting me to come out with you. This was exactly what I needed. For the last half hour, I didn’t have one serious thought.”

“No problem,” Olive replied. She tugged her headband out of her hair. “Do you usually have a lot of serious thoughts?”

My heart thumped at all the thoughts darkening my mind—thoughts that I couldn’t share. I walked around and sat next to her, resting my forearms across my knees.

“Things have just been really…tough for my family lately,” I hedged.

Olive pursed her lips. “I hear you.” She stuffed her headband into the pocket of her shorts, bulky cargo things that were not made for running, and leaned back, crooking her arms behind her head. “Of course, I’m the one who made things tough, so…”

She trailed off, pulling her feet up onto the bench and looking past my shoulder to the west. In that direction were the docks of the boatyard and about half a dozen boats bobbing peacefully on the bay. Looming in the distance to the north was the bridge, surrounded, as always, by thick fog. There was something mesmerizing about all that slowly swirling gray mist. From a distance, it wasn’t as terrifying.

“How so?” I asked.

She looked me in the eye, and the depth of the sadness and regret I saw there made something flip inside me.