“Tell me. I deserve to know, even if it is horrible. I’m not a little kid. Don’t treat me like one.”
“It happened before.”
“You mean . . . he brought another girl there?”
“Yeah,” he replied, his voice just above a whisper.
“What happened? Did you help her get away, like you did me?”
“Damn it, will you go to sleep, Harper?”
“Jake, I just wondered—”
“Just shut up! Give me a break, okay? I was a little kid. I was eleven years old, and when I did try to talk to that other girl, Emmitt caught me at it, and he—”
He broke off, horrified to realize the truth had almost all come spilling out of him, that he’d almost just revealed something so deeply shameful to her, of all people. One second, they’d been talking calmly, and the next, his weakness had been in the spotlight. He swiped his hands over his cheeks angrily, thankful for the darkness so that Harper wouldn’t see him crying like a baby. Neither of them spoke for a moment as he got ahold of himself, and his breathing evened.
“It must have been awful. I’m sorry for asking you so many questions,” she said finally.
“It’s okay,” he mumbled, deeply ashamed of his outburst.
“Do you really think he’ll kill you if he finds us?” she whispered, and he heard the tremor of fear in her voice.
“Maybe not. Maybe he’ll just beat me. It’ll be okay. I’m used to that.”
“That sucks.”
“I can take it.”
“Not the beating. That you’re used to it.”
Another silence descended, one in which Jake became even more hyperaware of her than he had been before. It was like some kind of invisible cord joined him to her.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?” he replied tentatively.
“Do you want to share the blankets? We could put two of them under us that way, and two on top. We could get close together. Share body heat. That’s a thing, right?”
“Yeah,” he whispered. It was most definitely a thing. “Okay.”
He rose from the hard floor, the prospect of Harper’s body pressed next to his making him weak.
nineteen
Present Day
The young, capable-looking young man that had parked Harper’s car on the night of the cocktail party was the one to come and collect her that night from her town house. Harper opened her front door before he had a chance to knock.
“Hello,” Harper said, stepping over the threshold and closing her door behind her. “It’s Jim, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” the chauffer said, seeming pleased that she’d recalled his name.
He seated her in the backseat of a dark blue Mercedes sedan a moment later.
“Quite a hot spell we’ve been having, isn’t it?” Jim asked her politely from the front seat of the sedan as he pulled out of her complex a moment later.
“Yeah. Tahoe Shores will be packed for Labor Day, I imagine, with weather like this.”