“I love you, Mom and Dad,” she whispered. “I love you.” And then the tears came, released from the place where she had hidden them. She turned into Luke’s embrace and clung to him as he held her against the storm.
The sun had turned the lake to liquid fire when peace came at last. Luke released her without a word when she pulled away gently, touching his face with her hand, and got stiffly to her feet. He followed as she climbed up from the lake’s edge to the cairn she had begun and helped her gather stones to cover the wreckage, until only the plaque remained.
In the hush of dusk Joey set the plaque at the top of the cairn and wedged it in place. Only then did Luke leave her side. She stood before the cairn, alone but no longer bereft. It seemed right that she should say her last good-byes as darkness fell, that she should feel the burden of sadness lifted with the coming of night.
She found Luke crouched at the water’s edge.
“Thank you, Luke.”
He looked up, a handful of earth sifting from his opened fist. In the dim light she could see nothing of his expression.
“Was it enough, Joey?”
She understood what he asked “Yes,” she murmured, kneeling beside him. “I feel—as if I know they’re at peace now.”
For a long moment she listened to the rhythm of his breathing, letting the new, unfamiliar contentment wash over her. “For the first time in years I feel free.”
Luke looked away, his profile silhouetted against the afterglow that lingered on the water. “Then there’s no reason we can’t return tomorrow.”
Joey froze in the act of reaching out to touch him. Less than an hour ago he had held her while she cried as she had never cried before, rocked her like a child and shared her grief as only another orphan could. Now his voice was distant, almost cold, and as he turned back to her he flinched from her extended hand.
She let her arm fall. “It’s so beautiful here,” she said. “If we could stay a few more days…”
“No.” Abruptly he got to his feet, setting his back to her. “The weather could change any time. We’ve been lucky so far, but I want you out of the mountains and—” He broke off, but the word he would have spoken echoed between them.
Gone. He wanted her gone. Staring blindly at his back, Joey folded her arms across her chest.
She had what she had wanted of him. He had done what he’d promised. She had laid her parents to rest, and she could go on now—on with her life, looking ahead instead of behind.
But when she looked ahead, it wasn’t her old job in San Francisco that she saw, or the constricted life she had left there. Luke filled her sight, a dark shape standing on the path that led into a limitless future. Waiting just beyond the void left in her heart when her parents had died.
What do you want, Joey? she asked herself. The questioned echoed in her heart and went unanswered.
Releasing her breath slowly, Joey rose and moved to stand behind Luke. His body tensed, muscles going rigid at her nearness, as if he had thrown an invisible wall up between them.
She might have backed away. It would have been a simple thing. But there was a strange new joy in her that would not be silenced, a sense of hope that nourished her natural stubbornness.
Luke had been a mystery from the first day she had met him, and that mystery had only deepened in their time together in Val Cache and on the trail. Luke wanted her gone, out of his life, for reasons she didn’t understand.
Not yet
You won’t find it quite so easy to get rid of me, she told him silently. I never give up until I find all the answers.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, Luke jerked his head up sharply. His nostrils flared “The wind is shifting,” he murmured, almost too softly for her to hear. He pivoted and took several steps away, looking deliberately over Joey’s head. “We’ll make an early start in the morning.”