Page 45 of Wind Valley

“No, I know, it’s…” She shook her head, looking so distressed he regretted ever bringing it up.

“Never mind,” he said quickly. “I’ll be more efficient if I go by myself. I promise to bring you some Thai takeout.”

As she turned back to the woodstove, setting her mug on the coffee table, he saw a tear roll down her cheek. Oh no. Somehow he’d made things worse. A tear? What had he said that could possibly cause her to cry?

“Maura?” he said gently.

She buried her face in her hands, which made her lose her balance, until she was on her butt on the floor, her back propped against the couch. She was fully crying now, it seemed. Maybe it was the aftershock of the wolf incident?

He stood helplessly, not knowing if he should hug her, or fetch something for her, or quickly invent a machine that took words back after you’d said them.

“It’s not you,” she sobbed into her hands. “I mean, it is you a little because you’re so sweet. You’re the kindest man I’ve ever known, and I feel terrible because I don’t deserve it.”

He recoiled at that description, which didn’t feel right to him at all. “No…Maura, please don’t say that?—”

“Just let me talk, okay?”

24

“You were right about the man you saw in the photos.” She was afraid to even look at Lachlan, because she was terrified to see his face close up, to watch him withdraw from her. “He thinks we have a relationship, but we don’t. And he won’t let it go.”

“A stalker?”

“I call him SS. Scary Stalker, and sometimes Stupid Stalker. Which is very unoriginal, but proves how much he freaks me out.”

Lachlan settled into the arm chair on the other side of the woodstove. Instead of looking at his face, she kept her eyes on his socks, thick and hand-knitted, with red and green stripes—someone’s Christmas present to him, no doubt. The sight was so wholesome that she teared up again.

“Does he have a real name?” Lachlan asked.

“Yes, of course, but I prefer to never say it. I’m trying to erase him from my existence. Thanos-style, except just in my own head.”

“Is that why you don’t want to talk about him?”

She shivered and inched closer to the heat radiating from the stove. “In a way. It’s like those legends where if you say someone’s name three times in a mirror, they appear. Rumpelstiltskin, Bloody Mary. I always have this secret fear that if I say his name—or even talk about him at all—he’ll pop up like a Jack in the Box. He has a way of doing that. He had a way,” she corrected herself. “That’s in the past now. He doesn’t know where I am and I really need to keep it that way. That’s why I came to Firelight Ridge, and why I can’t leave yet. I feel safe here, but not anywhere else.”

“I see.”

But she wasn’t sure if that was true. Could he see? Could anyone who hadn’t experienced it know what it felt like to be so powerless? To be always on guard, always waiting for that next shoe to drop? “You don’t see,” she said bluntly. “How can you?”

Right away, she worried that she’d hurt him. Lashing out at the wrong person—that was something she’d found herself doing as she first grappled with her situation. But a quick glance at him told her he hadn’t taken it personally. He was still watching her with his head cocked, waiting for whatever she said next.

“I mean, it’s hard to convey the feeling of being someone’s…prey. It didn’t matter what I said, what I did, he just kept hounding me. He came to my school and freaked out the history teacher I was just starting to date. He figured out how to get into my apartment and would just…be there when I came home. Just hanging out, making dinner, waiting for me to get back.”

“Jesus. Did you call the police?”

“Of course, but that’s the thing. He’s a police officer. I live in a very small town with a police chief who’s been around forever. Guess who his son is?”

“SS?”

She liked the fact that he used her nickname for him so easily. It felt like he was taking her side. “Exactly. His only son, mind you. Very spoiled, very used to getting his way. Also, since he was a cop, he was very savvy about knowing how to cover his tracks. Every time he managed to get into my apartment, he made it seem as if someone had called him from my landline. There were all kinds of situations like that, where it would have been his word versus mine, and he always had some kind of bogus evidence that would back him up. I reported him several times, even got a restraining order, but it didn’t make a difference. I’d call the police but no one would show up. I think he might have been intercepting the calls somehow. He spread rumors about me and threatened to charge me with stuff I didn’t do.”

Shudders were running through her body as she brought back those memories. Trauma lives in your body, someone had told her. She’d never understood what that meant, until SS. Now she knew on a visceral level.

“I even talked to his father, the police chief. I was still in my naive phase, thinking he might do something to help me. I sat in his office with all his awards on the walls, photos of him shaking hands with politicians and so forth. I explained that SS wouldn’t leave me alone even though I’d said ‘no’ a million times. I told him I’d done some research and thought that his son should see a behavioral therapist. I even gave him a list of names.”

“What did he do?”

“Told me to fuck off. I mean, he said it nicely, with a smile, and not in those words. He said something about ‘young ladies who make up stories to get attention,’ and how much our town owed the police for maintaining law and order, and then he specifically mentioned my father’s business. My dad sells medical equipment and one of his contracts is with the ambulance service that the police department uses. The next day, that contract was canceled.”

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