With no safety net in sight.
She’d vowed never to fall for a man with a dangerous job, because she had the blueprint of what she might become. She’d seen it in her own mother for years. A vacuum. A black hole of years missed.
Images flickered by. A photo album of lost days and nights, with pictures of her mother leaving Megan and Travis to get themselves up every morning, make breakfast, pack lunch boxes, then find their own way home after school. They’d come home, make the dinner, do the laundry, help each other with homework, lean on each other more than her.
Slowly, steadily her mom climbed her way out of the grief and the sorrow, and Megan found it hard to fault her for that kind of reaction to the love of your life dying. But she certainly didn’t want to chance that kind of life herself, no matter how much heat flared between her and Becker.
She stared off at the river, slow-moving and meandering, moseying on down the riverbed, crossing rocks that jutted out of the mud. “I used to spend so much time here when I was a kid. I always ran off to the river when I was sad,” she said as she sank down on a rock. Maybe it was the river, maybe it was the memories, maybe it was him asking a simple yeah? that led her to keep talking as he joined her. “And then sometimes when I wasn’t sad. It just became my place, like a safe spot where I couldn’t get hurt. Travis started coming with me and we’d hang out by the river. I felt like this was the only place in the whole wide world that was immune to trouble.”
“What’d you guys do here?”
“We made mud pies. The best mud pies in the whole county. One time, we loaded them up in the crate attached to the back of my bike, and brought them back into town. We set up a little stand with a card table in the town square and tried to sell our mud pies.”
He laughed softly. “Get any takers?”
“Shockingly, no. But the local paper took our picture so we thought we were hot shit. Then we decided to bake brownies and sell those instead, and let me tell you—thanks to our mud pie picture in the paper we made a killing with our brownie stand. Called them Mud Pie Brownies.”
“And no one was worried they were actually made with mud?”
She gave him a sideways glance. “I was eight. Travis was twelve. We knew everyone. We weren’t trying to hoodwink the people of Hidden Oaks. But we did include extra dark chocolate and that’s why everyone loved them so much.”
“You still make Mud Pie Brownies?”
“Sometimes. I’m not that into cooking, but I’m damn good at baking.”
“What else?”
“What else do I bake?”
He smiled lightly, then shook his head. “What else did you do at the river?”
His voice had a soft quality to it, or maybe he was just relaxed, sitting here on a rock with her, enjoying her stories of how she’d grown up.
“I can make an excellent dam. Don’t make a beaver joke,” she added quickly, fixing him with a serious stare.
He held up his hands in surrender. “No beaver jokes, I swear.”
“It’s all because of Travis. He taught me. We could spend hours laying twigs and stones and branches right over there.” She pointed to a bend in the river. “Doing everything we could to divert a little bit of water, and to see how long the dam would hold. He said it was, and I quote”—she began imitating her brother’s voice—“a vital skill for any sister of mine to have.”
Becker nodded. “I can hear him saying that. It sounds like him.”
Maybe talking about her brother wasn’t such a good idea, since he didn’t want anything to happen between them. Even so, she had such fond memories of her times with Travis here at the river, and sharing those stories with Becker simply felt right. This river was her place, the spot she’d run to, the place where she felt at peace with the world and all the terrible things that had happened to her family. The place she’d been when she decided to get her owl.
She glanced over her shoulder at her owl. At its permanence on her skin. “The owl you asked about?”
“Yes.” His eyes never strayed from her.
“When I was younger, maybe seven or eight, there was an owl who showed up outside my house every night for several weeks. I swear this owl stood like a sentry by the peaked roof over the garage. I could see him from my second-floor bedroom window, and the owl seemed as if he was watching me with those unblinking eyes.”
“Owls do that, don’t they?”
His voice was calm and strong, and though she’d rarely shared her story before, she felt comfortable telling him. “I used to pretend the owl was an emissary for my father, guarding me, keeping me safe, watching over me. I’d grab my notebook and colored pencils, fling open the window, and stand at the windowsill to draw the creature,” she said, and she could hear the wistfulness in her own voice as she told the story that was so crystal clear in her memory. “And that’s why I have an owl on my shoulder.”
“For your father,” he said, with something like reverence in his voice.
“To keep him close to me. To remember him.”
“That’s beautiful. Reminds me of soldiers who lose men on the battlefield and remember their fallen brothers with a tattoo,” he said, his dark eyes intensely serious.
“Or cops. Or firefighters,” she offered, and he looked away briefly, and winced as if the mention was too much.
She laid a gentle hand on his arm, and he turned his gaze back to her.