He didn’t look back this time, but I could hear the emotion in his words, the way pain had turned his voice vulnerable. Every other sound faded away—the water pounding the rocks below, my lungs sucking air, the blood thudding in my ears. It was just me and Paul on that hill, and his love for her was flaying my heart.

“I loved her for every day of our time together. I would have loved her the rest of our lives. That’s why all the talk afterward was so infuriating, so unbelievably appalling. Those people don’t know me at all. They didn’t see how I suffered.”

“God, Paul. I’m so sorry.”

He stopped in the middle of the path then, turning back. “No, I’m sorry for burdening you with all this. But I know I’m the elephant in every room in this town. I know how people talk, and I wanted you to hear it from me, not them. Even though, obviously, it’s still a painful subject.”

Obviously. And he’d waited until he was here, leading me up a hiking trail, rather than face-to-face across a dinner table. A group of rowdy hikers came bounding down the trail, and Paul slapped on a smile for them, for me. By the time they disappeared into the woods, the moment had passed.

We started back up the hill, and that was when I knew.

The thing I wanted more than anything, the only thing, was for Paul to love me like he had once loved Katherine.

10

A half-dozen trips up and down the hill later and I am officially done. Spaghetti legs, freezer-burn lungs, skin tingling like I’ve been slapped all over. I can’t keep up with the thirst of Micah and the others, at last count seven hungry bodies who’ve sucked down the coffee faster than I can make it, along with five packs of cookies and two banana breads I dug out of the freezer, defrosted and slathered in cream cheese.

By now the body is long gone, laid out on some cold metal slab at Harris Regional, being poked and prodded by the medical examiner. The cops have made a mess of the back hill, a crisscross of muddy tracks and footprints fanning out from a blue party tent they erected over a flat spot at the bottom. They’ve dragged over a teak table and some chairs, arranged them around a firepit they coaxed into a roaring bonfire. It sends up smoke signals people can see for miles. Dead woman found here. Rubberneckers welcome.