Her cascade of rich dark hair had fallen over her face, veiling the depth of her emotion before he could know what lay behind it, he remembered squeezing her hand, trying to offer comfort even as he’d drifted off to sleep with the ease and innocence of the very young.
“When I woke the next morning, she was gone.”
Luke lifted his head. He could feel his face settling into a perfect, indifferent mask of stone. Like stone, his eyes saw nothing. “She had left everything behind, but she never returned—not after that day, or the next or the next. I finally understood for the first time what she had done.” Even the memory of the deep sense of betrayal, of adolescent rage at his mother, himself, the world—even that did not reach the calm surface of the face he turned to Joey.
“I went after her then. I tracked her with all the skill she had taught me. She had hidden her trail well, but I followed it. It led me to the village—the place she had spoken of.
“It was there I found her. There were many strangers, people I had never seen except for one or two I had glimpsed in town or in the forest. They looked at me without surprise. My mother was there, on the doorstep of one of the cabins, her face was more at peace than I had ever seen it. She seemed to be sleeping, but I knew.” The image of her face, the echo of his wild howl of grief at her treachery in leaving him, reverberated to the roots of his soul, trapped there to die in memory. “The villagers tried to help me. They took me away while they put my mother to rest in accordance with their own ancient traditions. I never knew any of that until much later.”
He wondered how he could explain to Joey those days of torment, when he had suffered in the grip of a raging fever born of terrible grief and the changes that were even then coming upon him. Her face now was tense with a reflection of the pain he could not show, as if she expressed it for him. No—even she could not know the source of that pain.
There was too much intensity, too much emotion. He had to end it now before it went too far to stop. Between them and within himself.
“Later, when I recovered, they told me more about my mother and how she had grown up there and come, at last, to leave them. They had taken her back, willingly, though too late—regretted having cut her off, grieved for her. Because of that, they accepted me and made me one of them. They never spoke of my father.” The word grated, again. “When I went back to the cabin, I gathered up a few belongings and went to live among them for a time I finished what education Lovell could give me, and when the time came I went Outside, as my mother had wished.”
Those long years in the city, away from everything he loved, had been torment, the burden of constantly mimicking what he was not, what he had no desire to be—of fulfilling his mother’s wish for him, in honor of what she had been—had brought him back wiser but with no love for his fathers world. He could no more speak of those things, now, to Joey than he dared give in to his own dark yearnings.
Abruptly he ended it. “There’s little more to tell.” The sound of his voice came remote and detached to his own ears. “I came back, and never left again.” He looked up to meet Joey’s eyes across a fire that had grown small and cold, it was a relief to turn his attention to the simple task of building the fire up again.
He knew she was still watching him, waiting, even before she spoke.
“Thank you.”
It was hardly more than a breath, though he heard it as clearly as a shout. “Thank you for telling me. I—” He knew when she looked away by the infinitesimal change in the soft lilt of her voice. “I was wrong to pry, and I’m sorry—sorry for everything.”