“Good-bye, Joey,” Collier said, his voice almost lost in the roar of the engine. “Take care.” He smiled at her one last time and closed the door, stepping back from the truck. Joey rolled down the window and leaned against it, as if she could somehow memorize their faces, carry the clean mountain air in her lungs all the way home, take it all with her into lonely exile. She thrust her hand out as the truck pulled away, and Collier’s fingers brushed hers, then he was receding, and Maggie’s bright head was a splash of color just visible through a veil of tears.
She stared back until they left Main Street, rounding the gentle curve that led to the highway. The trees closed in on either side, and the twin cliffs that guarded Lovell from the rest of the world rose up against the brilliant morning sky. Joey leaned back in her seat and shut her eyes. He had not been there, but she felt him, even now she felt him watching her, and it wrenched at her soul like physical pain.
Her heart had become a dull, leaden weight in her chest when she heard the cry. She knew what it was before she turned, twisting her shoulders to look at the cliffs vanishing in the distance. It was just possible to see the silhouette balanced at the edge of the sheer drop. The wolf poised there for a moment of aching silence, flung back its head, and howled.
The lament of his cry twisted in her heart long after they had left Lovell far behind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Joey stared at the blueprint rolled out on her desk, watching the neat lines and angles blur and shift. Spring sunlight shafted in the huge office window, patterned between the blinds like the bars of a prison.
She spread her hands to smooth the paper as if that might somehow resolve it into something that made sense, there was no reason, no logical reason that her eyes should refuse to see it for what it was, that her hands should move independently of her will to create fanciful embellishments that had no place in a world of strict function. Logic. Practicality.
“The client isn’t happy with the design, Joey,” Mr Robinson said behind her, clearing his throat. She started, looking up without seeing, staring at a bland beige wall marked with a precise geometric pattern. “They want something much simpler, more practical. Frankly, I don’t understand why this wasn’t clear to you before.”
Joey’s eyes fell to her fists where they clenched on the tabletop. Paper crackled under her weight. It was wrong, all wrong. Everything.
“We hired you based on your excellent reputation for clean, functional designs,” Robinson droned on at her back. “That’s what the client wanted, and I don’t understand why you’re having such trouble coming up with it. This is an apartment building, not a cathedral.”
Joey knew she should turn, face Robinson, defend herself. But there was no defense. He was right. The need to define the world with lines and angles, to close it into neat little boxes—slowly, inevitably, that need had drained away. For three months she had struggled to bring it back and be what she had been before. She had tried with all her strength to control the overwhelming desire to break free of those neat, tight little boxes and escape into chaos. The best she had managed was this designs that satisfied no one. They were not hers, not any longer.
Now Robinson’s voice pushed and pushed at the fragile calm she had somehow managed to maintain. Her fists clenched tighter, and her pulse began to beat in her ears. “You’re going to have to resubmit, and you’re going to have to do it fast. The client expects this design by the beginning of next week. Are you listening to me, Ms Randall?”
Three months. It seemed like three years. Three months of trying to pick up the pieces of her life, searching for peace. Peace that should have been hers now that her parents had been laid to rest at last. Peace that wouldn’t come. There was a gaping wound in her soul, a raw place that wouldn’t heal. Where the bond had been was a sucking emptiness that seemed to take more of her every day, swallowing her, destroying even the bleak accommodation she had made with this life of lines and angles and walls and deceptive certainty.