Page 191 of Heart So Hollow

When I walk over to it to inspect it, I note that it wasn’t pulled loose by a fallen limb, the wire isn’t old and deteriorated, and the rest of the wires connected to the poles along the road are still intact.

This wire is cut clean.

I lift my head and methodically scan the trees before slowly turning and starting back up the driveway to the house. As soon as I reach my 4Runner, I hear a faint bark echo through the woods. Slowing my pace, I pause and then veer off the driveway and around the house to the backyard. I come to a halt at the deck stairs and pause to listen. Eventually, I hear another distant bark.

Our dog followed them into the woods when they left on their hunting trip and hasn’t come back.

This in itself isn’t surprising. It’s what he does all day, every day. He patrols the perimeter, wanders through the woods, does whatever it is dogs do when they have a hundred acres of freedom. I gaze into the trees, remembering that there’s another barn, deeper in the woods, where ranchers used to keep cows a long time ago when they pastured on the other side of the creek.

Maybe he’s there. At least, I hope he is by the time it gets dark and the coyotes start calling. He’s used to them, but I still worry because I know what they can do if they surround a lone animal. Coyotes, in general, used to scare the fuck out of me, but not so much anymore.

I’ve seen worse than coyotes. I’ve been hunted by worse. And I’ve seen real monsters in the woods.

I glance down at my phone, now reliant on data, and then set my jaw and march toward the dense tree line.

Come on, the corner of my mouth curls, destiny’s waiting.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Brett

One Year Ago

“It shouldn’t take long,” I collapse onto the sofa with my laptop and start entering my password, “I can still send it tonight.”

“Because it’s totally finished, right?” Bowen calls from the kitchen as he walks back and forth between the sink and the counter, filling the coffee maker for the next morning.

“Exactly.”

When I attach the entire manuscript to an email and press send, it’ll feel like a weight off my chest. At least one, anyway. Colson will never be normal—whatever that means. To me, it means he won’t ever see me as anything but an obsession, a focal point on which to be eternally fixated until something catastrophic happens.

An unsustainable coping mechanism…

He’ll listen to me all day and he cares about every word I say, except for my insistence that our lives don’t fit together anymore. And that makes this unsustainable.

But you provoke him. You just lead him on, trying to relive the past and take from him the parts you like. You only make it worse.

The irony is unreal. Colson gives me Jada’s information and now she’s my opportunity to get out of that building and break away from him. But it’s for the best. Why should Bowen have to tolerate this kind of abuse? It’s enough that I go to work every day with my stalker who tried to murder me years ago. Why should he have to continue dealing with it—deal with it making me crazy—any longer than necessary? If Colson didn’t act like…himself, maybe he could finally come to terms with the fact that we can never go back to where everything started and we could move on.

But do you even want to go back? He was stalking you since before you met him…

Logic says no, I shouldn’t want to go back there, where everything started. But humans are neither logical nor rational.

I navigate to my Writing folder on my laptop, drag the cursor down the list to the folder labeled, Mountaintop, and double-click. The folder opens.

And it’s empty.

Exhaling in exasperation, I close the window and reopen it, assuming the sync is lagging for some reason.

It’s still empty.

I mutter a few curses, minimizing the window and navigating to the cloud, where I always save a copy of my latest draft. Now, I just hope I remembered to do it the last time I modified the document. I click on the Writing folder in the cloud and scroll down the list, looking for the same Mountaintop file, except this one will have the date of the most current draft after it.

But there’s nothing.

It’s gone.

Both documents are gone.

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