I caught sight of Aaron as soon as we entered. He was marking tools and when he saw us, he came up brazenly, but something in Luca’s manner must have given him pause because he stopped abruptly before he got too close. It was strange with Luca. He was more threatening when quiet than others are in a temper. Aaron closed his mouth, and when he opened it again, it was to say only a casual, “Hello, folks. Can I help you?” But even that was more than Luca was willing to take.
He grabbed Aaron by the throat and backed him into a pile of lumber. “I don’t want you around my wife,” he said. “And I don’t want you around my child. Do you understand that?”
Aaron didn’t seem to have the good sense to be afraid, despite having his wind cut off like that. “I didn’t know she was your wife,” he said, but not in apology. Instead, he seemed only amused that we had married.
“Well, now you do. So stay away from me. Stay away from my family and my house. If I catch you anywhere near the inn, I’ll kill you,” Luca told him, without further elaboration. With that, he let go of Aaron and hurried both of us out of the store.
He wouldn’t speak to me all the way home, and when we got back to the inn and I tried to take his hand, he flung me off. “Rennie’s taking a nap,” I said. “We could go upstairs and—”
“Not now,” he said, crossing the room in long angry strides, his hands thrust into his pockets. “How can you think of that when we’ve been insulted this way?”
“Aaron didn’t insult us, Luca. He hardly spoke to us.”
“It was his manner. He didn’t have to speak. He was taking your clothes off with his eyes.”
Another girl, a younger girl, a girl who didn’t know things, would have been flattered by her husband’s jealousy. I was just afraid. “Can’t we just forget this day?” I pleaded with him.
“Forget it?” He turned to me with renewed fury. “You think I’m afraid of him, don’t you? You think I’m afraid of Aaron Hamilton.”
In that moment, I saw how very young Luca was and how very little he knew about what mattered and what didn’t. “I don’t think any such thing. But—”
“But what?”
“But I think you should be afraid. I love my life. I never thought I’d live to say that. But I love my life with you and our child. I won’t risk that for anything, certainly not to prove that you’re not afraid of him. And that’s why we have to stop parading through McAllister’s just to show we can.”
He looked at me with contempt, but I wouldn’t stop talking. “Don’t you see? Aaron isn’t right in the head. He never has been. Maybe the reverend made him that way. Maybe he was born that way. I don’t know. I don’t care. For whatever reason, the Hamilton boys were always crazy. Everybody knows that. They never cared about their own lives or anybody else’s. Aaron’ll kill you as soon as say good morning. That’s why you just got to stay out of his way until he gets tired of this and hops a train to go torment somebody somewhere else. It’s the only way.”
“It’s not my way.” His jaw hardened and through his teeth, he said, “I’m not a coward, Darcy, and now I see that you are.”
I went and put my arms around him and my forehead against his shoulder. “Only about you. I couldn’t keep on without you. I’d sooner die.”
“Stop it!” He shook me off.
“Please, I’m not asking you to hide from him. Just don’t seek him out. If you care for me, you’ll do that much. I know Aaron. You can only imagine him.”
It wasn’t in Luca to refuse me much, and I felt him soften. He kissed my forehead and lifted my chin. “All right, Darcy. We won’t go there anymore. But know this. If ever I see him near the inn, I’ll kill him, even if it means spending the rest of my life in prison. There are some things worse than dying. Do you understand?”
I nodded and kissed both his dimples, but I knew then, as I had always known, that it would be no challenge of Luca’s that would draw Aaron to the inn. It would be me.
7.
The Rest Is Lies
It was coming, coming, had been coming all along. Just like Jesse, for surely it hadn’t started the day he had set foot on the porch steps. Surely it had begun long before that. When? Maybe the day he’d stolen a motorcycle, thinking to hide. Or the day he’d jumped ship. Or the day he left wherever it was he’d come from. Or the day he was born.
It had been coming all along. I know that now. Each clock at the inn, and there were many because Jewel loved clocks, ticking off the seconds one by one until the day arrived. Everything waiting, waiting for the proper month in the proper year on the proper day at the proper hour. It had been coming all along. I knew it. And yet I was still surprised.
Remembered well, too well, for later I would relive it again and again in waking dreams. Everything. The weather, hot and heavy and unnervingly still, threatening thunder. What I wore. What Luca wore. Everything I did that evening.
We’d had a scrawny chicken for dinner, and after the dishes were put away, I had gone up to put Rennie to bed. I waited while she said her prayers. I’d always thought the benefit of prayer dubious, but Luca, who was comforted by ritual, insisted
