life. Longing for Woodend, the four-hundred-year-old house that breathed her history. Haddington history, from before she was Mrs. Silverberg.
“Some days.” Bugger. Why did she have to cripple herself with honesty? Other people told juicy little fibs and fat whoppers of deceit all the time. But with one baby truth, she had shoved the conversation in a direction she had no desire to follow. “You’re clearly comfortable, though, sweltering in the nineties.” Her mouth was dry, her throat scratchy. She swept her tongue over her gums to find moisture. It didn’t help.
“I’m familiar, not comfortable, with this weather.” James returned the checkbook and pen to his backpack, but Tilly sensed he was regrouping, not conceding. “It reminds me of childhood summers, and childhoods have a powerful hold over us. I’m sure you agree.”
Tilly didn’t trust herself to answer. A thrush trilled from the mimosa tree, but she imagined the music of the blackbird’s lullaby at Woodend. She pictured the paddock rolling toward fields dotted with clumps of bracken and the ancient trees of The Chase, the medieval hunting woods, looming beyond. If she closed her eyes, she might even smell her mother’s lavender. Tilly wasn’t aware of starting to walk, but she and James were sauntering toward the forest. Anyone watching might have assumed they were friends out for a stroll, which proved a person should trust with her heart, not with her eyes.
“Where’s your childhood home?” Marvelous. She meant to terminate the conversation, not prolong it. But when was the last time she had a bona fide I’ll–tell-you-mine-if-you’ll-tell-me-yours chat with anyone? Just last week, Rowena, Tilly’s best friend since they were four years old, had written a snarky email that started, “Answer this or I’m giving you the boot.” And yet Tilly had discovered an amazing truth in the last few years: the further you drifted away from others, the easier it was to keep going.
Had James not heard her question? “Where—”
“Rural Illinois,” he said.
Aha! That was why he wasn’t sweating. “Farming stock?”
“I’ve tried hard not to be.”
Tilly fished the remaining shard of ice from her gin and tonic and crunched it between her teeth, dampening the crescendo of cicada buzz. “Look, I’m melting faster than the ice in my gin, and I have to start supper. I apologize for wasting your time. I should have made it clear to Sari that I had no intention of taking the business in a different direction.” Actually, she had stated it every which way and then some. Sari, a dean’s wife with a master’s degree in communications, had understood just fine.
“If I took you on as a client, I would be rushing helter-skelter into something new, something I can’t handle right now. I appreciate your interest in my work, but I can’t help you. We all need things, Mr. Nealy. We rarely get them.”
“I’m curious. What is it that you need?”
Tilly rubbed her left hand across her mouth, jabbing her thumb into her jawbone. “Peace,” she replied.
“In the Middle East?” He dipped toward her as if to catch her words.
“Peace from others.” She held his gaze and felt the remnants of her bonhomie sizzle up in the heat. “I need the world to bugger off and leave me alone with my thoughts.” And my guilt.
Sinew jutted from his neck. “That’s a dangerous place to be, alone with your thoughts.”
Tilly gulped back why, because she didn’t want to know. Her thoughts were like tender perennials in a greenhouse, and she didn’t need some stranger to crack the glass.
He blinked rapidly, and his mottled eyes filled with an expression she recognized. She hit a fawn once, driving along Creeping Cedars at dusk. Sprawled on the verge, the poor animal lay mangled and broken, its quivering eyes speaking to Tilly of the desire to bolt, hampered by the knowledge that there was no escape. The same fear she saw now in James.
Vulnerability, the one thing she could never resist.
A burst of sunlight caught on James’s small, black ear stud. A black pearl?
“Please,” James said. “Please show me your garden.”
She would have agreed even without the second please. “On two conditions.” She slugged her gin. “You understand that I’m not agreeing to take you on. And I fix you a drink while I freshen up mine.”
But James didn’t answer. He was wandering along Tilly’s woodland trail, his index finger tapping against his thigh.
Chapter 2
Faster. James floored the gas pedal, even though faster was never fast enough. Twenty-five years ago, he would have been tearing across farm tracks on his Kawasaki H2, a motorbike that had earned its nickname of Widowmaker. Tonight he was racing along some county road in his Alfa Romeo Spider with the top down and the Gipsy Kings blaring. He conjured up his favorite scene from Weekend at Bernie’s in which a corpse water-skied into a buoy, but couldn’t even rustle up a smile. Movie slapstick was his happy pill, although obviously not this evening.
He glimpsed his reflection in the rearview mirror. God Almighty, some stranger could zip past the Alfa right now and have no inkling of the horror festering inside its driver. At worst, he looked like a guy trapped in a killer hangover and the black-only fashion dictum of the eighties. No one would guess that he was, quite simply, a man trapped. James had read somewhere that life was about how you lived in the present moment, which might be true for millions of people without obsessive-compulsive disorder. But for James, living in the moment was hell. And he never got so much as a day pass.
Would he ever find peace, or would he always be that kid terrified of the boogeyman hiding in his own psyche?
He could feel germs mutating in the soil. Soil Tilly had transferred to him. Why, why had he shaken hands?
The Alfa screeched onto the gravel in front of an abandoned gas station and James leaped from the car, leaving the engine running. He grabbed one of six bottles of Purell from the glove compartment and emptied it over his hands, shaking out every last drop. Terrific. Now his palms were sticky as well as contaminated. Cringing, he rubbed them together until they throbbed.
A squirrel shot in front of him, rustling dried-up leaves as it disappeared into the forest, squawking. Smart little rodent. I’d run from me, too, if I could, buddy.
Shaking his hands dry, James glanced up. He needed big sky, Illinois sky, not this wimpy patch of cerulean obscured by trees. Even in Chicago, he could see more sky than he could in Chapel Hill, where the forest closed in from every angle. And at night, the roads were dark like pitch, trapping him, blind, in purgatory.
Was it too late to reconsider this whole move? Yes, it was. He had started down this path the only way he knew how—with absolute commitment. There could be no running back to Illinois. He had made sure of that by selling everything—the farm, the business, his apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Everything but the Widowmaker and the Alfa.
He had moved south with one purpose: to be part of the exposure therapy trials at Duke University, and finally, finally learn how to reclaim his life from fear.
A rusty white pickup truck lurched down the road, an animal crate on its flatbed rattling against restraints. His father had offered to cage him once—a drunken joke that wasn’t remotely funny. Regret rose in his gut, and James hardened himself against it. Back then no one, not even James, had understood that his bizarre behavior and repetitive thoughts were caused by an anxiety disorder. And his dad? His dad died believing that his only kid was damaged beyond repair. But James was going to prove him wrong. Hell, yes. He was going to prove his dad wrong. OCD had nearly destroyed James’s life once. And he would do whatever it took to become that guy, that normal guy, who could shrug and say, “You know what? Once is enough.”
The original plan had derailed, but he wouldn’t turn back. Not that he could even if he wanted to, since he’d never been able to walk away from anything. OCD was behind that, too. It was the root