Lover's Knot by Emilie Richards Read Free Book Online

don’t know who you are anymore,” he said.
    She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. “I love you, Isaac. Everything else is changing, but that never will.”
    He kissed her; then he pulled her close. She felt as hollow-boned as a bird. He was afraid that the moment he released her she would take flight.
    “I don’t know when I can come again,” he warned.
    “I’ll be here when you do.”
    When he was behind the steering wheel of his car, he looked up and saw that she was still standing where he had left her. He wondered if she would make it up the steps. He wondered when or if he would stop worrying.
     
    She could always change her mind.
    Kendra watched Isaac’s Prius disappearing into the woods and felt panic pulling her down for the third time.
    “I don’t have to stay.” She closed her eyes and tried to imagine where she would go instead. Nowhere.
    She took deep breaths and, minutes later, opened her eyes. The sun shone, and the air was alive with birdsong. Try as she might, she could not hear a single car. Isaac’s high-efficiency engine was silent at the low speed he would use on these roads. Besides, even if he’d been driving a diesel truck, Isaac was probably too far away to hear her call.
    Isaac was gone.
    “Welcome home, Kendra.” She started back to the porch, but once she was at the steps, she thought better of trying them. Instead she hiked herself to the edge and used her hands to move her left leg. The effort cost her every drop of strength she had left. She broke into a sweat, and for a moment she was afraid the subtle nausea she’d experienced all day was going to overwhelm her. She lay down carefully and gazed up at the porch roof.
    Her physical therapist had told her that recovery was a fine balance between pushing herself and not pushing herself. Today she had landed heavily on the side of the first.
    Kendra had spent very little time asking herself why the carjacking had happened to her. She didn’t believe in a universe that protected one person at the expense of another. She didn’t expect favoritism from God, but she had asked herself how she had let anger at Isaac lead her into that dark parking lot when she had been too sick to fend for herself.
    The answer hadn’t pleased her. She had been angry at Isaac for a long time. Angry that he held no new aspirations for their marriage. Angry that the man who could sense every undercurrent at work had no idea she was unhappy. Or, worse, that he knew it and thought the unhappiness would simply pass without intervention.
    The night she’d been shot, she had set out to prove something. By doing so, she had set in motion a chain of events that now had her staring up at a beadboard ceiling.
    “Well, who’d have thought it?”
    She liked the sound of her voice here. She was soft-spoken, easy to miss in a noisy newsroom, easy to ignore when the man she was speaking to had more important things on his mind. Here her voice seemed to fill the silence between the calls of cardinals and the chittering of chickadees. It sounded important, as if there was every reason to sit up and take notice. It sounded at home, as if it belonged with the rustling of treetops, the scurrying of squirrels.
    “I will make myself happy here.” She liked the sound of this. She could almost believe it.
    The panic was subsiding. The air was growing cooler. A breeze through the dogtrot played with her hair and cooled her cheeks. The nausea diminished. She wasn’t on a timetable. Sam and Elisa had made the bed. She had towels, food, water. She was okay. She could count nailheads or knots in the timber until sunset was a memory. She had nowhere to go and nothing to do. No one expected anything of her now.
    She wondered how Isaac was feeling as he drove back toward D. C. Sad. She truly believed that would be part of it. He had closed his eyes to the problems between them for so long that all this had come as an unwelcome surprise. Angry. That too.