Leaving Haven by Kathleen McCleary Read Free Book Online

weeks was her daily workout. If she couldn’t run—or do squats or do lunges or jump rope—she would lose her mind. Literally.
    Alice straightened up and put her weight on the traitorous ankle, and felt shooting pain. “I can’t walk on it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
    Duncan came back to where she stood and put an arm around her. “Here,” he said. “Lean on me.”
    He had not touched her in more than a month. He hadn’t brushed up against her at the bathroom sink or let his foot nudge hers in bed or allowed his fingers to glance against hers when he handed her a dish to dry. Five weeks . Alice wanted to weep at the feel of his arm across her back, his hand against her ribs as he guided her up the steps.
    â€œSit here.” He pushed her gently onto the couch in the living room and knelt down to unbuckle her silly sandals. He pulled a pillow from the couch and put it on the coffee table in front of her, and lifted her tender ankle onto the pillow. “I’ll get some ice.”
    She sat looking at her ankle, which was already swollen. She heard the clatter of the ice trays in the kitchen, running water, drawers opening and closing. Duncan came back in and wrapped a dishtowel around her ankle and placed a ziplock bag filled with ice cubes on top of the towel. He wrapped another towel around the bag and her ankle, to keep it all in place. “There.”
    He stood back and looked at it, then at her. “Are you okay?”
    His kindness undid her. He should have left her hobbling outside, but of course he would never do that, because he was such a fundamentally decent man. She buried her face in her hands and cried. She had not cried during all these long weeks when he had avoided her touch, her look, her conversation. She had not cried in November when she’d found out about the cruel hoax the girls had played on Wren, and she hadn’t cried when Wren had wept in her arms over the betrayal. She hadn’t cried—really cried—over her mother. So many things going all wrong, and Alice had kept herself together, until now.
    â€œ No, ” she said, wiping her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “I’m not okay. I’m sorry—sorrier than you can know, because you would never do something like I did. I’m lonely and terrified of losing you and I can’t stand not talking about it anymore. It’s like I landed on the moon and I don’t recognize anything, not even myself.”
    She took in a deep breath. “I am not a person who makes excuses,” she said. “I don’t have an excuse. There was nothing rational about it. But, Duncan”—she looked up at him, willing him to understand—“there were reasons it happened, reasons we need to talk about. And it has changed me, and I hope you can understand that. I’m a different person; I know myself in a different way now. And I can promise nothing like that will happen again.”
    He was silent for a long time, looking at her.
    â€œYou’re not who I thought you were,” he said at last.
    â€œ I know, ” she said. “And I know that must be a shock, and it must hurt. I don’t—I didn’t—know myself. But this has changed me.”
    â€œI hate change,” he said. He picked up his laptop and left the room, leaving Alice there alone on the couch, bruised.
    S HE LET HIM be. It was like soothing a wounded animal, she realized. A few years ago Wren’s cat, Gremlin, the most easygoing and loving of creatures, had developed an abscess inside his ear. All at once he had become like a wild thing, slinking around the floor on his belly, terrified of every movement and sound, staring at her without recognition, out of his mind with pain. That was Duncan right now, Alice understood. And she couldn’t do anything other than hold out her hands—in support, in supplication—and wait for him to come to