Chapter 8: The Guardrail

Mace's POV

I was sixteen the last time I saw Tom Watkinson alive.

It was raining on the mountain road, and I had followed the two of them on a dirt bike I wasn't allowed to ride.

I saw Ray's headlight stop at the guardrail, and I saw Tom's bike on its side beside it with the wheel still turning.

Tom lay on the gravel with his helmet off.

He looked at me.

Ray stood over him with a phone in his hand and didn't dial.

I started toward them, and Ray said without turning, "Go home, Mace. Tom was alone out here. You never came up this road."

I went home.

I was sixteen, and I did what I was told, and I have thought about that road every night since.

I thought about it again that night, flat on a cot in my own garage, listening to Mallory's footsteps cross the floor above me.

She had not slept.

Neither had I.

I kept seeing her palm open under the lamp and the white gravel scars in it, and how her pulse had jumped under my thumb and then held steady.

She had not pulled away.

I knew what that meant to me, and I did not know what it meant to her.

I had no right to want it.

I'd let her marry a Dunning with the keys to her mother's secret in his pocket, and I'd stood in the back pew and said nothing.

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