Page 32 of Beneath the Mountain Sky
To love her.
Then why did you let her go?
“How about we stop talking about my love life and just concentrate on figuring out what the fuck happened to Willow?”
Because that’s all that’s important right now.
Addressing the consequences of my fuck-up might be painful, but my suffering is nothing compared to what Willow endured.
Liam sighs, glancing up at the building cloud-cover. “Fair enough. For now. But don’t think I’m going to let this go forever. It’s not healthy, you know—not talking about things…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
I bump my shoulder against his as I walk past, pushing northwest along the river, searching for what would be the most obvious and easiest path. “She was barefoot.”
When I pulled her from the river, she wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks. The current could have pulled them from her feet, but given the state of them—the scrapes and cuts—it was as clear to me as it was to the hospital staff that she was making her way through the woods without them.
Running from something?
Or someone?
Liam nods, pressing his lips together into a firm line as he scans the water’s edge. “I know.”
I turn the other way, toward the dense woods, surveying every inch of the ground. “She would have looked for the path of least resistance…”
Willow isn’t familiar with this part of the mountain.
No one is.
But she’s spent her entire life in the area and enough time in the remote woods with me to know how to travel through dense foliage without getting hurt.
My gaze catches what appears to be a game trail cutting between two trees at the edge of the forest. “I found her, what, a mile downriver?”
“Yeah.” Liam moves closer. “But that doesn’t mean it’s where she went in.”
It could have happened closer to here, the current bringing her downstream until she got caught up on that tree.
“I’m going to follow the game trail. You stay along the shore and search for any signs of where she might have gone in.”
He nods. “I’ll meet up with you.”
I set off down the game trail, nothing more than a beaten path created by deer and other wildlife on their way to the river, looking for any obvious human activity that could have been Willow.
Several yards down the trail, I draw to a stop.
A bare footprint exactly the size of Willow’s feet in the soft ground makes me grit my teeth.
It rained two nights ago, which means she was cold and wet before she ever made it to the river.
Tightening my grip on my axe, I push forward until a flash of color up ahead draws my attention, the same color of red as the tattered shirt she was wearing when I pulled her from the water.
She definitely came this way…
“Liam!”
He can’t have gone far, and up here, sound carries.
It takes a few minutes before I hear his thundering footsteps, and he appears behind me. As soon as I know he can see the same thing I do, I reach out and tug the tiny scrap of cloth off the branch.
