A Love Lost to the Years novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Broken Glass

Kenneth did not go to the mill.

He drove past the end of Ore Dock Road on Friday and kept going, and he hated that he'd obeyed her.

On Saturday morning he drove up the bluff to the house with the truck bed empty and a list of tools in his head.

The front door was unlocked.

"Annabel?"

Nobody answered, but the kitchen tap was running.

She stood at the sink with her back to him, one hand held under the water.

The water in the basin was pink.

Broken glass lay across the tile by the refrigerator, in a wide bright fan.

"What did you do?"

"I dropped a glass," she said, without turning.

"You dropped it on the other side of the room."

"I threw it."

He stared at the back of her neck.

"At what?"

"The refrigerator." Her voice was perfectly steady. "It was in my way."

He crossed the kitchen, turned off the tap, and took her hand in both of his.

The cut ran across the heel of her palm, right over the old pale scar, and it was deep enough that it kept filling.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'm fine."

"Annabel. Sit."

She sat on the counter stool and let him pull the first aid box from the drawer where it had always been.

He cleaned the cut.

She watched his hands and did not make a sound, even when the antiseptic must have burned.

"Hold it still," he said.

He closed his left hand around her wrist to keep it steady, and he laid the gauze across with his right.

His thumb sat on the inside of her wrist, below the heel of her hand.

Her pulse was running hard and fast against it.

He had held this wrist a thousand times, across tables, down hotel corridors, in his sleep.

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