When We Let Go, Delancey Stewart [early reader books .txt] 📗

He was the best part of the diner’s management team. The only good thing about Adele was that she disliked the other waitress, Miranda, almost as much as she hated me. Our shared despicability had forged an immediate bond between Miranda and me. Adele disliked us for different reasons: I was evidently just too fancy for her tastes, while Miranda had a nasty habit of spilling coffee, dropping plates, and finding things to trip over on completely smooth floors.

When the place was a steady hum of satisfied diners and empty tables, I poured a cup of coffee for Miranda and another for me. We stood behind the counter, savoring the calm, as we gazed past the yellow Formica tabletops to the quiet street.

“What’s going on?” Miranda could read me like a book. I hated it. But I also kind of liked it. It wasn’t like I had lots of girlfriends to talk to.

I sighed. “Jack stopped by this morning. He’s trying to sell the house. Some guy actually wandered around testing beams and tapping on things.”

“What guy? Someone from up here?”

“Like I would know.” I knew the nearest neighbors to my property, since my parents had been good friends of theirs when I was a kid. Otherwise, I kept a low profile and didn’t get too close to the folks who lingered around the village. I did make friends with some of the little kids who came running through my property now and then, fishing out snacks that I brought home whenever I went to the grocery store. Kids, I understood. Grown ups? Not as much. And the dust-smeared mountain kids who roamed in packs during the summer were my tribe. Or they had been once. My brother Cameron and I had roamed these hills with a band of grimy children of all ages, scrambling over rocks and laughing off scraped elbows. Now when the kids showed up with their jubilance and spared me a few minutes of laughter kicking dust around my lot, I relived the past for a little while. They let me snap photos of them and I let them climb on the unfinished structure of my stupid house.

I fished the card from that morning out of the pocket of my jeans. I’d pulled it out of my robe and stuck it there, planning to examine it later. I put it on the counter in front of Miranda.

“Holy cow,” she said, bending over to read the card as she pushed her blond hair from her face. “This is the guy who wants to buy your house?”

“Yeah, why? You know him?”

“Everyone knows who he is. No one really knows him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is Connor Charles.”

“Yeah, I got that from the card. Where it says right there? See?” I pointed to the name. “Connor Charles.”

“Right. Well you know who that is.” She was nodding and giving me a look that said I should understand immediately whatever she was trying to convey.

“Miranda, seriously? No. I have no idea who that is. Some guy with dark red hair and sunglasses.” The card didn’t offer any other information. Who had a card that only had a name and a phone number anyway, besides psychics and socialites? Weird. I shrugged and added, “Kinda hot, too.” I couldn’t help it. He totally was.

“He’s that super-creepy writer. The one who lives in the cabin around Deerwood Point off the meadow?” Her eyes were wide and the freckles across her nose seemed to stand out as if they were trying to help her make her point.

“Oh him.” I made my voice reverent, but I was just doing it for effect. “No idea. I haven’t really had a lot of time to get to know the locals, and I’m not exactly a bookworm. If he doesn’t eat here, I don’t know him.”

“He definitely doesn’t eat here. Not anymore, anyway.” Miranda glanced around and then leaned in, her glasses slipping down her nose. “He writes those twisted books. About serial killers and stuff? He’s super famous and super hot. And super scary.”

“Because he writes horror novels?”

She shook her head, a smile on her face that told me she was enjoying sharing the gossip. “No, because when he moved up here, he had a wife. Or a girlfriend. But no one has seen her for like a year. They used to go out together, eat here, go to the village potlucks. But then we didn’t see her again. Like literally, she disappeared. Rumor has it he’s keeping her prisoner up there in his fancy house.” She looked around, as if Connor Charles might appear at the counter. “Stay away from him, Maddie.”

“Well, I’m not planning to sell the house anyway. Not yet.”

“Right.” Miranda nodded as if that made perfect sense, and then spun around to answer a wave from one of her tables. Her coffee cup toppled off the saucer on the counter as she swung her arm, and I caught it and wiped up the mess as Adele watched from the podium.

I wondered how much of what Miranda thought she knew about Connor Charles was true. She had a vivid imagination and an appetite for gossip. Since I’d never seen Connor up here before, I wasn’t too worried about crossing his path again.

I spent the rest of an endless day at the diner, watching the sun weave among soaring treetops from one side of the village to the other as some of the season’s last tourists stopped through for burgers and sundaes before heading back to their tents and rented cabins. It was easy to lose track of the days up here. The mountains and the big trees measured time in centuries, not in months, days, and minutes. And most days looked about the same to me. But since Jack had stopped by, I knew it had to be a weekend, and a glance at the calendar on my phone confirmed it. It was Sunday. I had Mondays off. Normal people would be looking forward to some down time, or some project they’d been hoping to tackle on a day off. But Monday held little interest for me, and I’d spent many of the last few in bed, pretending things were not exactly as they were and hating myself for letting it all get so screwed up.

The cooktop in the trailer worked intermittently, and I got lucky that evening, managing to heat a can of soup to go with my toast and red wine. I carried dinner outside, managing the door with my foot and elbow, and wound my way through the skeleton house. In what would have become the eat-in kitchen, I set my bowl and bottle down on the concrete and lowered myself beside them. The kitchen was supposed to have soaring plate glass windows facing the slight decline behind the house that led to a ravine farther down the slope. In the early spring, you could hear rushing water down there, but by this point in late summer the entire state was parched and dry. Just a trickle of dusty water coursed through the rocky bed now.

I’d almost drown in that water as a tiny girl. I didn’t really remember the incident. My brother Cam had told me that we were playing with some other kids from around the village, and I’d fallen in. There was a deep pond that had been formed over years and years of water rushing into it from the rocks above. It was a side branch of the bigger stream when it was flowing in full force, a quiet spot to the side of the rushing water. Quiet and deep. The water was freezing cold since it was snowpack runoff. I’d reached out too far that day and fallen in, and neither Cam nor I were good swimmers. We were too little. One of the bigger kids had jumped in to save me, pulling me out and carrying me back up to my dad. I hadn’t been in long enough to swallow much water, and I was fine, but it had scared my brother. He’d made a big deal about learning to swim after that, and stayed close to me any time he thought we might be in danger. He had been my protector from that day forward. All the way through high school to college and beyond. Until three years ago when he decided not to be anymore.

I stared at the darkening green around me. My home was perched atop a mini mountain, at the end of a dead-end road that climbed out of the small village of private homes. Many of them—most of them, really—qualified as true cabins. A few of our neighbors still had working outhouses, and most of the structures were rustic. One of the nearest neighbors had done his damnedest to ensure that our huge modern house would never be built, petitioning congressmen and lobbying the Forest Service and anyone else who might help him preserve the sanctity of the place. But my family had owned this land for more than one hundred years, and there was little anyone could do to stop it from being developed. I had pushed Jack to build something a bit more spare, something that fit in with the rustic landscape instead of competing with it, but as with most of our arguments, I’d lost.

Jack had been everything I’d ever wanted when we’d met. It was like he’d read a book about how to sweep someone off her feet and had followed the instructions page by page as we got to know one another. He’d mastered the grand romantic gesture long before we met, and he had it down to an art form by the time I strolled into his office to ask about buying a condo I’d seen in my neighborhood. Jack was as slick and polished as any man I’d ever known, from his perfectly shined loafers to the salt and pepper waves that set off his blue eyes.

He told me he wanted to take care of me and didn’t want me to work. I’d believed him, and too easily gave up the cluttered photography studio I’d been building into a real business. At the time it seemed like just another reasonable thing I did for love.

As the trees faded to blend into the background of inky blue sky overhead, I considered going in and picking up the camera. But it seemed like a lot of trouble, and every time I touched my camera I still heard Jack’s voice telling me that photography was a ridiculous hobby for a woman like me. That I could easily pay someone to take the pictures I wanted. Jack’s answer to everything.

But I had a fresh desire to take pictures