Page 15 of 15 Summers Later

After the fact, she could think of a dozen things she might have said in response. Instead, she had withdrawn inside herself, all of her porcupine quills aquiver as she became defensive and self-protective.

Because it is part of my past. It’s not who I am now.

Cullen’s voice had been more sad than angry.Don’t you see, Ava?What happened to you during those six months at Ghost Lake made you who you are. Now that I’ve read the book, I can see so many things more clearly. I would have understood. You had to know I would have understood. Instead, I feel as if you have spent every moment we’ve been together hiding your true self from me. You never completely trusted me. Us. Did you?

The memory of the hurt and betrayal in his warm brown eyes knocked into her like a wrecking ball. She felt lightheaded suddenly, a mixture of exhaustion, regret and fear.

“Take a rest.” Leona touched a cool hand to Ava’s face. “Everything feels better after a little nap.”

“It’s close enough to bedtime. If I nap now, I’ll never go back to sleep.”

“I’m the same way. I get it. Well, unpack your things and then come down and you can help me in the kitchen.”

Her grandmother bustled away and Ava sagged onto the bed, eyes closed as she tried to push away more memories that crowded in. Cullen’s silence as he packed his things for his summer fieldwork. The thick tension in their apartment as she tried to think of some way to fix everything that had been rent apart by her words inGhost Lake.

Her phone rang. Sylvia again, she saw on the display. She let it go to voicemail, but it immediately rang again.

With a sigh, she answered. She couldn’t avoid the woman forever. “Hello.”

“There you are! I was beginning to worry, darling. I thought maybe the Coalition might have come looking for you.”

She shivered, even as she knew that was highly unlikely. The Ghost Lake Survival Coalition had completely cracked apart after that final shootout fifteen summers ago. The thirty-odd core members of the prepper cult that had temporarily taken up residence deep in the Sawtooth Mountains had been arrested or fled long ago.

The leaders, including the man she had been forced to marry when she was only sixteen years old, were still serving prison sentences for shooting and wounding two federal officers and for killing an innocent man who simply had been trying to help her and Madi.

“I’m sorry. It’s been a hectic few days.”

Oh, and my life is falling apart. So there’s that.

“Where are you, Ava? You sound like you’re a million miles away.”

“I’m in Idaho. I came to visit my grandmother for a...for a few weeks.”

“Oh. How far are you from...you know. Where everything happened?”

She closed her eyes. She was never very far away, at least in her memories. “About an hour.”

“I wonder if you could go there and take some pictures of you holding the book there. It would look great on your socials.”

That was absolutely the last thing she wanted to do. She would be happy never going into those mountains again, though how she expected to reconnect with her husband when he was in roughly the same area remained a mystery.

To her relief, Sylvia didn’t wait for an answer, quickly moving on to the reason for her call.

“Your publicity team is so upset about having to cancel the tour. They’re wondering when they could reschedule.”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Next month? Two months?”

How aboutnever?

She couldn’t say that, unfortunately, as much as she might want to. Part of her deal with her publisher entailed her agreement to participate in promotional events, including the ten-city book tour she had ditched.

“What about early August?” she suggested. “I only need to wrap up in time to return to my classes around the twenty-second.”

“That might work. It’s only six or seven weeks after you were originally scheduled. I’ll talk to them and get back to you. If the book tour conflicts with the start of the school year, maybe you could get a substitute for a few weeks. Or better yet, take a sabbatical or something.”

Ava hated the idea of someone else starting the school year with her students and of missing those important first few weeks of the school year.

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