Page 28 of 15 Summers Later

She hugged him. “Thanks.”

After she stepped away, she wasn’t sure what to do. Should she embrace her own husband? He stood looking down at her, his features still shocked to find her here, as if she were one of his dinosaurs come to life.

She took another step away from both men, a move that apparently didn’t go unnoticed by Luis, who looked between the two of them with a concerned expression.

“Um. I’m going to keep shopping, Cul. Text me when you’re ready to take off. No hurry.”

Another customer had moved up to the stall and was considering which bouquet of flowers to buy. Leona started talking with the woman, which left Ava to face her husband alone.

He continued gazing at her with stunned disbelief. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to visit your grandmother?”

“It was...a last-minute decision.”

She immediately felt stupid. Of course it was a last-minute decision. That had to be obvious to him, considering he had only left their apartment earlier that week and she had said nothing to him about coming to Emerald Creek.

“What about the book tour? I thought you were supposed to be going to New York to kick things off.”

“I... It’s been postponed indefinitely.”

She didn’t tell him she had backed out after realizing she would completely collapse under the pressure of trying to be engaging and articulate to readers and booksellers when she felt so wrecked, physically and emotionally.

Her publisher was not thrilled with her about it.

We need to ride the wave right now, Andrew Liu, her in-house publicist had said, looking almost in tears at a virtual meeting Sylvia had arranged to explain to her team that they needed to pause plans for the tour.You’re hot right now and everybody wants to meet you in person. We’ve had interest from indie bookstores all around the country. I hate to tell everyone no. In another month, someone else might have the book du jour.

The book du jour. The phrase made her cringe. She didn’t want to have penned the book du jour. While some tiny part of her couldn’t help being thrilled that others apparently found her words worth reading, on the whole, she found the entire fuss mortifying.

At the same time, she knew she was in no state to show up in public and talk about being a survivor, when right now, she felt anything but resilient, when she was failing at the one thing she valued above anything else. Her marriage.

“What does Sylvia have to say about that?” Cullen’s expression was veiled and she wished she could read what he was thinking.

“Everyone agrees it’s for the best right now,” she lied. “Maybe before school starts again, we can do a tour. The timing isn’t right.”

“That’s good.”

They acted like polite acquaintances, like dozens of other people who had visited their stall and chatted with her grandmother about the weather and the price of hay and the volunteer fire department’s pancake breakfast, coming in a few weeks.

Her chest felt heavy, each breath scouring her lungs.

They weren’t polite acquaintances. Cullen was the love of her life, her rock, the one person on the earth who made her feel cherished and valued and...safe.

From the first time they met, he had seemed like an old and dear friend. She remembered talking with him for hours at that party, and then, when he offered to give her a ride home, they had sat for hours more in his car on a rainy Portland night, enclosed in an intimate bubble as they shared hopes and dreams and life experiences.

She knew about his first kiss in second grade, delivered by a girl who had caught him under the art table when he had rolled the persimmon crayon there and they both crawled after it.

She knew about his older sister’s problem pregnancy and his father’s death when he was seven, and his mother’s successful career as a pediatrician and her remarriage.

She had told him many of the details of her own life, too. Growing up in eastern Oregon, the small hobby farm where her father had grown corn and tomatoes by the bushel and about her beloved sister, Madi, who was studying to be a veterinary technician.

And the car accident that had killed their mother when Ava was fourteen and Madi was twelve.

She had glossed over so many things. The long, hard months after their mother’s death they had all spent in eastern Oregon on the farm. Her father’s descent into conspiracy theories and survivalist dogma as a way of coping with his grief. His association with others who were like-minded, an association that had somehow morphed into Clint Howell’s absolute conviction that he needed to protect his daughters by selling their farm and moving with them to the mountains of Idaho, to a compound ruled by a pair of heavily armed brothers she now considered sociopaths, at the very least.

She also hadn’t shared with Cullen other details of that time. The constant gnawing hunger, bitter cold, cruel punishments meted out for any small infraction of the Coalition’s ever-fluid rules.

Or her “marriage” that had lasted less than a day, to a man she abhorred.

She had loved Cullen Brooks with her entire heart, from that very first night. That he had fallen for her as well, Ava had considered nothing short of a miracle, a rare and priceless gift from a capricious God she thought had abandoned her a long time ago.

---