The Forest's Son by Cyndy Aleo Read Free Book Online Page A

get answers to about his past, about where he's really from, about what he plans to do next. She’ll always wonder if what kept them from being more would have been resolved with the answers she wants.
    With a deep breath, she pulls the car back onto the road and continues home, trying to imagine what her life will be like if she never gets the answers to what she's seen today, if the mystery ends for her right here. She knows this isn't the kind of thing that will turn up in papers or on national news. Whatever is going on with Vance and his mother, they are people who exist off the grid.
    If she fails to show in the morning, she has no doubt they’ll simply disappear from her life as if they’d been a dream. She'll never have that odd moment of seeing something and turning to her husband in a house in the suburbs where she lives with a minivan and two cookie-cutter children and saying "Oh, how strange. I knew that family once. I was friends with the son and I drove him to classes back in college."
    It can never be that normal for her.
    She reaches home and makes a cursory check to make sure her cat has food and water, ignoring her growling stomach and its need for dinner. She goes straight for her bedroom, pulls back the blankets, and curls up in her bed fully dressed. She drags the covers over her head, and clutches a pillow to her chest. Even with the hallway lights still on, with the deep purple sheets, she can fool herself into believing the entire world has gone dark.
    She falls asleep quickly, still not entirely decided about what she’s going to do in the morning. Maybe that will come to her in the sweet oblivion of sleep.
     
    9: Fork
     
    One moment's distraction brings a lifetime of ramifications. No one should know that better than Grace, and still she'd forgotten it. She'd never left Donovan and Vance alone in the house together, not entirely, and especially not right after he had forgotten, when she knew the girl would be at her most upset and inquisitive and her son would be at his most fragile and unguarded.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid.
    Or was it?
    The possibility that maybe she is tired of keeping the secret alone all these years didn't escape her. No one likes to carry a burden alone, and this one is a particularly heavy one, especially for one who was raised to be one of many, not one alone. She is forever a bee cut off from her hive, cast adrift, and she is so very tired.
    It makes her angry to think she may have subconsciously set them all up so she could end her loneliness. After all that she has suffered — that her son has suffered — to be so careless as to expose them is unacceptable.
    She stands in the middle of the kitchen and stares at the things she has allowed them both to collect over the years they have lived here. How many of them would she want to take if they fled? She has allowed them to become tied to a place and to material objects when her foremost thought has always been to travel light, to be able to move quickly, and to leave no trace.
    They will leave a huge blot when they have to flee: a stain that will show evidence of their existence. An even bigger one if Donovan decides she wants no part of this and they leave her behind. This will be one place they won't disappear from easily, because they will leave too much of themselves behind: the people she does business with, those who see her when she goes into town, her son's classmates at the high school and now at the college … but the biggest issue of all will be Donovan.
    Neither Vance nor Donovan realize yet that they are in love with each other. Donovan wouldn’t even considering staying around Vance were she not in love with him. And her son — could he love Donovan back in that same way?
    He has never been in his right mind long enough to let himself have feelings for her other than those of a best friend. But his heart probably knows the truth, for he does this over and over not to protect the secret, but to protect