Rainshadow Road

“Let me have you,” he had whispered, resting his forehead on hers. “Let me make love to you all night. I want to wake up with you again. Just tell me what you need, Lucy, and I’ll do it.”

Make love. He had never called it that before. The two words had clamped around her heart like a vise. This was the torture of loving Sam—that he was willing to get so close, but not quite close enough.

And since the thing that she needed most—for him to love her—was impossible, she refused him once again.

* * *

Lucy finished the window two days before Alice’s wedding. People had started to arrive from out of town, most of them staying in cottages at the Roche Harbor resort, or taking rooms in the Hotel de Haro. Lucy’s parents had arrived that morning, and had spent the day with Alice and the wedding coordinator. Tomorrow Lucy would have lunch with them, but tonight she was going to have dinner with Sam. And she would tell him that she was leaving Friday Harbor.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the studio door. “Come in,” she called. “It’s unlocked.”

To her surprise, it was Kevin.

Her former boyfriend gave her a vaguely sheepish grin. “Luce. Got a couple of minutes?”

Lucy’s heart sank. She hoped this would not be an attempt to make peace, to discuss their shared past and smooth things over so that his wedding day with Alice was untarnished. It was entirely unnecessary. Lucy was over him, thank God, and she was willing to let bygones be bygones. The last thing she wanted to do was to autopsy their past.

“I’ve got a couple of minutes,” she said cautiously, “but I’m kind of busy. And I’m sure you must be even busier with all the wedding stuff going on.”

“Actually, there’s not all that much for the groom to do. I just show up when and where they tell me to.” Kevin was as handsome as ever, but there was an odd look about him. He had the blank, bemused expression of a man who had just stumbled on the sidewalk and turned to see what invisible object had tripped him up.

As he approached, Lucy found herself pulling spare pieces of paper over her tree window, feeling the need to shield it from his view. She went to the side of the worktable and leaned against it.

“Your brace is off,” Kevin remarked. “How’s the leg?”

“Great,” she said lightly. “I just have to be a little careful with it. No high-impact stuff for a while.”

He stopped a little closer to her than she was comfortable with, but she didn’t want to back away.

Contemplating him, Lucy wondered how a man she had once been so close to could now seem like a stranger. She had been so certain that she had been in love with him … and it had been a good approximation, just as silk flowers could look very much like real ones, or cubic zirconium could sparkle just like diamonds. But their version of love had been a form of playacting. All their love-words and cozy rituals had been a way to cover up the emptiness beneath. She hoped that he had found a deeper, more genuine relationship with Alice. But she doubted it. And that actually made her feel sorry for him.

“How are you?” she asked.

Something in her tone caused Kevin’s shoulders to lower. He sighed deeply. “It’s like being caught up in a tornado. The color of the flowers, the guest favors with personalized ribbons, the photographer and videographer and all that crap … this thing is way more complicated and crazy than it should be. I mean, it’s just a wedding.”

Lucy brought herself to smile at him. “It’ll be over soon. Then you can relax.”

Kevin began to pace around the studio, which was familiar territory to him. He had been in there countless times when they had lived together. He had even helped to install the vertical storage racks for the glass. But Lucy felt uneasy as he intruded farther into her studio. Kevin didn’t belong there anymore. He no longer had the right to wander through her workplace in such a cavalier way.

“The weirdest part of all of it,” he said, inspecting a shelf of finished lampshades, “is that the closer the wedding gets, the more I find myself trying to figure out what happened with us.”

Lucy blinked. “You mean … you and me?”

“Yes.”

“What happened was that you cheated on me.”

“I know. But I need to figure out why.”

“It doesn’t matter why. It’s over. You’re getting married the day after tomorrow.”

“I think if you’d just given me a little more space,” Kevin said, “I would never have gone to Alice. I think the relationship with her started as my way of showing you that I needed more room.”

Her eyes widened. “Kevin, I really don’t want to go there.”

He came back to her, standing even closer than before. “I felt like there was something missing between you and me,” he said, “and I thought I would find it with Alice. But lately I’ve realized … I had it with you all along. I just didn’t see it.”

“Don’t,” Lucy said. “I mean it, Kevin. There’s no point.”

“I thought you and I were too settled, and life was getting boring. I thought I wanted excitement. I was an idiot, Luce. I was happy with you, and I threw it away. I miss what we had. I—”

“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “You’re having second thoughts about the wedding? Now, after all the plans have been made and the out-of-town guests are arriving?”

“I don’t love Alice enough to marry her. It’s a mistake.”

“You made promises to her. You can’t back out! Do you get some kind of sadistic thrill out of making women fall in love with you and then dumping them?”

“I’ve been pushed into this. No one’s asked me what I wanted. Don’t I get to decide what makes me happy?”

“My God, Kevin. That sounds like something Alice said to me. ‘I just want to be happy.’ Both of you think happiness is this thing you have to chase after, like a child with a shiny toy. It won’t happen until you start finding ways to take care of other people instead of ways to please yourself. You need to leave, Kevin. You need to live up to the commitment you’ve already made to Alice. Take some responsibility. Then you might have a shot at being happy.”

Judging from Kevin’s scowl, he found her advice condescending. There was a mean, raw edge to his tone. “What makes you the fucking expert? You, who’s going out with that D-class poser, Sam Nolan. Mr. Wine Expert who comes from a family of trailer-trash drunks and is going to end up just like them —”

“You have to leave now,” Lucy said, going to her worktable, putting it between them. In the spectrum of self-pity to rage, he had swung from one extreme to the other.

“I talked him into going out with you. It was a setup, Luce … I was the one who did it. He owed me a favor. I showed him your picture on my cell phone, and asked him to take you out. It was Alice’s idea.” Now Kevin was smiling as if at a macabre joke. “To stop you from acting like the victim. Once you were going out with someone, once you moved on, it would get your parents off our case.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me?” Lucy shook her head. “I already know that, Kevin. Sam told me about it at the beginning.” She reached down to the worktable until her fingers encountered the soothing flat coolness of glass.

“But why did you—”

“It doesn’t matter. If you’re trying to cause problems between me and Sam,