Page 27 of Unwanted

Lucas looked at her. “Climb. If you want to get down there, you’ll have to follow me.”

She paused for only a moment and then nodded.

Lucas placed his bag on the ground and walked to the place where a tree grew from the side of the cliff, its root buried deep inside the rock. He grabbed hold of it and swung down easily, a move he’d done many times, in every season. He went down the sloped rock, finding the places his foot could rest and leaving room for Harper to follow him. When he tipped his head to see her, she looked nervous, but she followed behind him, doing the same thing he’d just done.

He moved slowly, far more slowly than he would have if he’d been on his own, but…he thought she did well. Like a baby racoon following its mother up a tree for the first time. Slow. Careful. But natural.

With each movement, her breath came faster like she might be having trouble catching it. But she hadn’t gotten breathless once during the walk, and he wondered about it but didn’t ask. Her parents were at the bottom, and he thought that was probably the reason why she couldn’t catch her breath.

His feet touched the ground first, cracking through the icy-topped snow and meeting the frozen ground below. It was colder down there—darker—hidden from the sun, and her breath made tiny clouds as she stepped down to meet him. The world around them shushed.

Their eyes met, and Harper seemed different…scared or heavier or…something, her eyes jumping all over the area behind him. He moved toward where he knew the vehicle was. He brushed some snow aside, showing naked branches that covered the blue of the car with leaves during the other three seasons.

A bit of the blue paint was showing, light hitting the metal and shining off it. Harper took off one of her gloves and reached out slowly, touching it like she didn’t believe it was real. She pulled her hand back, and Lucas cleared some more branches, using his arm to brush the snow from the cracked and dirty car.

The skeletons were the same as when he’d first found them—one turned toward the back seat, and the other bent forward. His heart felt heavy. These people belonged to her.

Everything grew silent around them, even the birds had stopped their morning chitter-chatter. But suddenly Harper fell forward, her sob shattering the air. She grabbed at him, and Lucas caught her. He startled and then stilled, taking her in his arms and pulling her against his chest as she cried, her sadness bouncing off the walls of the canyon and disappearing into the forest high above.

Chapter Sixteen

Harper rubbed at her eyes, still swollen and itchy days after finding her parents. Of course, she’d cried herself to sleep the night before, the vision of their skeletons filling her mind’s eye and piercing her heart. Now she felt so incredibly drained. The door opened, and Agent Gallagher entered the room and placed a paper cup in front of her, reaching into his pocket and taking out several packets of creamer and sugar. He placed those along with a stirrer next to the cup. “I figured you could use some.”

Harper wrapped her hands around the hot cup, the pleasure of the heat causing her shoulders to relax at least infinitesimally. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

It had taken a couple of days to organize the extraction, but the car, confirmed to have belonged to Harper’s parents, had been hauled from the bottom of the canyon hours before and transported to Missoula. A team of investigators would attempt to determine whether the vehicle had failed in some way and that was what caused the accident.

Her parents’ remains had been transferred to the medical examiner in Missoula, though Harper didn’t think—based on what she’d seen—there was anything to examine except bones. She shivered at the memory of what was left of the two people she’d loved most in the world.

She appreciated the effort that had been expended and the care with which she knew her parents’ remains would be treated. Of course, her father had been a well-respected sheriff and community member, and she knew the town as a whole would want to put him to rest properly.

As for Harper, she still wasn’t sure how she felt. She’d expected to feel relieved, and she did, but she’d also expected to feel some sense of closure, some sense that she could finally begin her life. She felt neither of those things, but they had only been found forty-eight hours ago. Only forty-eight hours since Lucas had held her in that dim, cold canyon. Only forty-eight hours since they’d trekked the long, mostly quiet walk back to Driscoll’s, where she’d phoned Agent Gallagher. It would take time, she figured. A week…maybe two, until she’d be able to finally put the tragedy behind her and accept that they’d never return.

I’m alone in this world.

It wasn’t that she’d dreamed or hoped they were coming back. She hadn’t fooled herself into believing they weren’t actually dead and gone. It was just…not having proof of their deaths—of the fact that she hadn’t simply imagined the accident, the cold, the falling, that had taken them from her—had kept her from being able to move forward emotionally.

Saying the words to Lucas a couple of days before, admitting she was stuck, was an important revelation for her. The hunt for her parents’ wreckage had kept her from moving forward. All these years, it’d kept her trapped in a way—emotionally immobile. Looking into his eyes, answering his perceptive question honestly, it had suddenly become crystal clear. Now, though, she’d found her family. She didn’t have to remain lost in time. Now…now she could figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She’d want to, she was sure of it. Just…not that day.

“I wish you would have told me before you went to Lucas’s place. I would have come with you.”

She snapped back to the present, considering what Agent Gallagher had said as he’d taken a seat across from her.

“I’m sorry. I thought about calling you, but…I thought I was being crazy. That locket… It’d been so long since I’d seen it. I thought maybe I was imagining things.”

Agent Gallagher regarded her for a moment. “So Lucas found your parents’ wreck at some point and took the necklace from there?”

Harper nodded. “He said he found it years ago.”

“Did he say why he wore it?”

“I didn’t ask. I figured it was just something interesting to him. I don’t know.” Maybe he liked the picture of a family inside it. Something he didn’t have. She thought about the way he’d held her as she’d cried, gently but stiffly, as though he didn’t know exactly how to hold another person. She wondered if anyone had ever held him, and her heart ached when she thought the answer was probably no. Or at least…not for a very long time.

“The car was found about nine miles from Lucas’s house. And nowhere near the highway between Missoula and Helena Springs. Can you think of a reason your parents might have turned off the highway onto dirt back roads? Why they would have been so far from the highway?”

Harper shook her head slowly. “No. My dad had driven from Missoula to Helena Springs hundreds of times. He knew the route like the back of his hand.” Harper searched her mind for anything about that ride home, anything that might shed light on this new information. But as always, when it came to the accident, there was nothing. Nothing except the feeling of the car falling and then the bone-shattering landing at the bottom of the canyon. Then…darkness. “It makes sense why the search party didn’t find the car,” she murmured aloud. They’d looked for it for weeks before giving up. No wonder her own search had never yielded results. She’d been looking miles and miles from where the accident had actually happened. She’d been—

“Do you have any memory of climbing out of that canyon?”

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