Page 14 of What Lies in the Woods

I hadtoldhim I was leaving for Chester. Just hadn’t mentioned when. Plus, we’d broken up. My whereabouts weren’t his business anymore.

I deleted the texts and collapsed back on the bed. Without the work to distract me, my mind thrashed its way inevitably back to the things I least wanted to think about. What were we going to do about Persephone?

It was like a bullet left in a body. The flesh had healed around it; digging it out would cause more damage than leaving it. Stahl dyinghad sparked new interest in our story, but that would be fleeting; the story belonged to the past. This would be different.

I wished I didn’t care—that I could be like Liv and want only for Persephone to find her way home.

But why should she be able to leave the woods, when I never had?

I woke up an hour later, jolting out of the recursive chase my mind had concocted—monsters in the forest, a trail that looped and twisted and plunged. My mouth was dry, my head fuzzy. I felt like deer jerky that had been in a hot glove box for a week, and my mouth tasted about the same. And of course I hadn’t remembered to pack a toothbrush.

I combed my hair into a semblance of respectability and walked the hundred yards to the gas station shop next door to find myself a toothbrush. The inside of the Corner Store looked exactly the same as it had when we were kids, simultaneously overcrowded and understocked all at once, with bumper stickers indicating a less than progressive political stance plastered over every inch of the front counter.

The string of bells over the door jingled as I entered, and Marsha Brassey, who’d gained about fifty years of wrinkles in the past two decades, looked up from her Sudoku and pressed a hand over her heart.

“My goodness, if it isn’t Naomi Shaw,” she said.

“It’s Cunningham now, Marsha,” I corrected with strained patience, tired of saying it.

“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry—getting dotty in my old age,” Marsha said, flapping a hand helplessly.

“Tell you what, I’ll let it slide as long as you never make me pay off my Snickers tab.”

She reached over to the candy rack and grabbed a bar to waggle in my direction. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

I took it with a smile, like I didn’t remember her smacking my backside with a broom for even looking too long at the candy she knew I didn’t have the money to buy. Every bad thing that had ever been saidabout me dissolved like sugar in water when I turned into a miracle. When Chester suddenly decided that after a childhood of being on the outside, I belonged to them.

“What brings you back to town?” Marsha asked as I worked my way down the aisles, grabbing the toiletries I’d left behind.

“Just visiting folks,” I said over my shoulder.

“You been up to see your dad yet?” she asked, all sweet like she wasn’t just salivating for a bit of gossip.

“That I have, Marsha,” I said, bringing my purchases up to the counter. “I’m doing what I can, but you know him.”

“Stubborn runs in the family,” she said wisely as she rang me up. “Shame to see the place so run-down.”

I choked on a laugh. “It was a piece of shit when Grandpa built it, Marsha. I wouldn’t waste any grief over it.” She tutted.

The bell over the door rang again, and a man in a denim jacket and red flannel shirt stepped in. He was tall and rangy, with hair that fell to his jaw. Sharp features and deep-set eyes gave him a hawkish look.

His eyes caught on mine and widened, and I started to arrange my features in the neutral-but-friendly expression I’d practiced, the one that was the closest to a smile I could manage without unsettling people. And then I recognized him.

“Naomi?” he said. Cody Benham’s voice was rougher and deeper than I remembered it, but I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him the second I saw him.

“Cody,” I replied, and the past that had been lapping at my heels like surf on the beach hooked me into its undertow.

Cody and Cass’s brother, Oscar, had been best friends. Oscar was the golden boy, Cody the bad influence. Most of the time, he ignored us—our occasional presence the irritating price to pay for Oscar’s company. Now and then, though, he’d give us a stick of gum and a “Hey, kid,” and he’d seemed so impossibly cool and aloof I’d have done anything to earn those scraps of approval.

Hitting the other side of forty hadn’t harmed his good looks, I noted.

“You come back to see Liv and Cass?” he asked.

“Seemed about time,” I answered.

“Because of Stahl, right?”

“What about that bastard?” Marsha asked. “What’d he do now?”

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