Page 27 of Sinners Atone
He’s a carpenter. Well, he cosplays as one, spending hours in his workshop and buying ridiculously expensive tools. In his previous life, he was one of Seattle’s highest-paid lawyers, with a reputation for representing the discriminated, the framed, and the justified. Poverty-stricken teens in the wrong place at the wrong time, housewives who couldn’t take another beating. That kind of thing.
He was the people’s lawyer.
I was eleven when he scrawled his signature on my adoption papers and took me out of Seattle. He said we weren’t leaving the city because of the men with cameras hiding in the bushes on the front lawn, but because a slower pace of life would be healthier for us. His husband, Oliver Harlow, had dropped dead of a stress-induced heart attack some months before, and he suspected it was the chaos of the city that did him in.
Finn had driven us west with a locked jaw. I had my feet propped up on the dash, humming along to ABBA’s greatest hits on the stereo and flipping through his copy ofCountry Livingmagazine. Devil’s Dip was the first place we came across that looked like the pictures within its glossy pages. By the time he’d realized the town was more rusty than rustic and that had we’d stuck to the highway for a few more minutes we’d have hit a town far more palatable, it was too late. He’d already bought ten acres of farmland, enrolled me in a local school, and committed to a carpentry course.
I fell in love with Devil’s Dip’s wonky charm, but Finn has never let go of his big-city thinking and luxury habits, though he’s far too stubborn to admit it.
And so for the last ten years, we’ve played pretend. We pretend like I don’t know there’s a wine cellar behind a false wall in his workshop, or that he spends most of his days in Devil’s Hollow schmoozing with the likes of Castiel Visconti at the country club. As for the whole carpenter shtick, I’ve never seen him build anything with my own eyes, aside from the bookshelf he put up for me a few years ago.
It collapsed the moment I placed a hardback on it.
Finn tugs back his coat sleeve to check the time on his Rolex. “Your insistence to walk is cutting into my sleep schedule, you know. I have to be up at the crack of dawn.”
I frown. “To do what?”
He tuts. “Chores on the farm. Have to be done before I fly over to Colorado for my carpentry course tomorrow.”
“What chores on the farm?”
“Farm-y things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. The usual.”
I bite my lip, choosing to focus on his shiny timepiece instead of picking apart his crappy agricultural knowledge. “I thought you only wear that thing for birthdays and weddings?”
He pauses, then his eyes warm behind his glasses. “Nothing gets past you, Wren. You’re going to make an excellent lawyer.”
My smile flickers, as though the wiring in my brain is faulty. I don’t bite; I never do. So it sits like a wedge between us, solid and heavy, as we turn onto the main road that leads us home.
It’s a long, lonely road, and the only one connecting all three towns on the coast. A crumbling slab of asphalt less than twenty feet wide that separates the edge of the National Reserve and the rocky cliff face.
Uncle Finn hates this road, and not just because the potholes have blown out his tires countless times. On one side, there’s the Pacific Ocean and its unrelenting wind, steep drops, and noguard rails. On the other, the streetlamps, strangled by vines escaping the border of the woods, are few and far between, leaving large stretches of darkness when the sun goes down.
More than anything, he hates that I walk it all the way from Cove to Dip if I miss the last bus home after my nights volunteering.
And I get it. A cute girl walking along a dark, quiet road at midnight all alone? I’ve watched the news. I might as well wear a flashing sign sayingKidnap Me! But not only do I know every twist, jut, rise, and dip of this route, I know the towns it runs through.
The Devil’s Coast is safe. Leave-your-car-unlocked, offer-a-ride-to-a-stranger kind of safe. Unlike Seattle or other big towns, there’s no crime, no gangs, no mysterious murderer with a sinister nickname on the loose. The proof’s in the pudding: I’ve been walking this route nearly every weekend, and nothing bad has ever happened.
The closest I’ve ever come to danger isthatnight.
As we pass, my eyes lift to the flickering streetlamp, then to the looming silhouette of the church across the road from it. Spires softened by shadows, the broken stained glass casting watery colors on the gravestones below.
And suddenly, I see him again, cloaked in black and bloodied, crawling away from the light of the streetlamp, fists scraping gravel, with ragged breaths barely audible over the sound of crashing waves and blistering winds.
My name touches the back of my neck. Then comes a grip on my elbow.
“Wren?”
I blink and meet my uncle’s concerned gaze. When I look back down at the road, it’s empty. Christ, I must be tired.
I take a deep breath and exhale a nervous laugh. “Thought I saw a bear,” I mutter.
Pathetic, I know, but Finn tuts, mutters something about bears beingyet anotherreason I need to get a car, and follows me as I turn off onto the trail that leads to our land.
