15 Days Before I Left Him novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Water

Hollis Pond was smaller than I remembered.

We parked at the end of the old boat road on Tuesday morning, and Raylan turned off the engine.

Through the bare maples I could see a flat round of dark water, not even a quarter mile across.

A skin of ice had formed along the edge overnight, thin and clear.

"I thought it was an ocean," I said.

"You were eleven."

"I thought it was an ocean for seventeen years."

I opened my door, and the cold came in.

We walked down the path together, our boots loud on the frozen leaves.

Raylan kept half a step behind me and a little to my left.

He did not take my arm, and he did not tell me to be careful.

I had asked him not to.

At the bank the trees opened up, and there was the place.

A flat patch of gravel and dead grass, with a fallen birch lying along the shore.

I had crawled up that gravel with my hand open, with a boy's hood still in my fist.

My knees went soft.

I stopped where I was, and Raylan stopped too.

"Do you want to go back?" he said.

"No."

"Tell me when."

"I'll tell you."

I walked the last twelve feet by myself.

The water lay still at the bottom of the bank.

It was brown at the edges and black farther out, with a few dead leaves turning slowly on it.

I stood with the toes of my boots at the line where the gravel stopped.

My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

I thought of my mother in the kitchen with my hand wrapped in a towel, saying, You were never at that pond.

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