How to Tame a Silver Fox novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: What Corinne Asked

He drove me to the cottage because I told him to.

I put the easel across the back seat, and I did not speak for forty minutes.

He did not fill the silence.

By the time he parked on the gravel, the lake had gone the color of iron, and I had decided what I would ask.

We sat on the screened porch with the daybed between us.

Neither of us sat on it.

"From the beginning," I said. "Not the part you think I can carry. All of it."

He leaned his back against the porch post and looked at the water.

"I was twenty-nine and I worked for your father, in the old firm, in an office with no window."

"I know that part."

"You don't know the next part."

"I was driving home from the gala, a mile behind your parents' car."

"I'd had one glass of champagne, and I'd left early with a headache."

His voice stayed level, and his hands didn't.

"At the Pike Bridge turn I saw taillights leave the road."

I held onto the post.

"I was there in under a minute."

"The car had folded into the abutment, and your father stood in the road with a hand on the roof, swaying."

"He smelled like a distillery, and he kept saying, I can't, I can't."

"And my mother?"

"Alive. Pinned on the passenger side, with her face turned toward me." He swallowed. "She asked about you before she asked about herself."

My eyes stung, and I let them.

"Then she told me to come closer, and I knelt in the glass, and she put something in my hand."

He opened his palm as if it were still there.

"The locket. She said, give it to Willa when she can look at it."

"And?"

"And she said the other thing. Don't let her lose him too. Please."

The lake lapped the dock.

I could not feel my hands.

"She meant my father," I said.

"She meant you'd already lost her, and she was asking me to keep the only parent you had left."

He breathed out.

"Then she died, with my hand over hers."

"Arlen."

"Your father came to the car window and said, Say it was you."

"He asked you."

"He begged."

"He said he'd go to prison for twenty years and you'd have no one."

"He said I'd had one drink and he'd had six."

He laughed once, without any humor.

"I told him no."

"But you did it."

"The sirens were four minutes out."

"I looked at her face and did the sum standing in the road."

"One of us would lose twelve years of his life, and the other one was ten."

He moved at last, and turned to look at me.

"He went down the bank into the water, and I never saw where."

"I got into the driver's seat and put my hands on the wheel."

I cried then, in front of him, in a way I had not let anyone see since the funeral.

He did not touch me.

"I pleaded to eighteen months," he said.

"My mother sold her house to pay the lawyer."

"I never told your father, and I never took his money."

"But the thirty percent."

"I took the seat because it was the only way to see you were all right."

He looked at his hands.

"I never looked for you before that. I made a point of it."

"Then I came to a house and found you on the stairs in your socks, standing on one foot like her."

I wiped my face with my wrist.

"You let me hate you."

"It was safer than being kind."

"It was stupid."

"It was that too."

I stood up, and the daybed creaked behind my knees.

I crossed the three steps between us and took his face in both hands, and he held very still.

"Stop being careful with me," I said.

"Willa."

"Stop. I'm asking."

His eyes went dark, and he said my name again, differently, and picked me up.

He carried me through the dark cottage and I pulled at his sweater before we reached the bed.

My hands fisted in the wool and dragged it up his ribs.

His breath went uneven against my hair.

"Willa."

I got his belt open in the dark.

The buckle clinked, and his hands tightened under my thighs, and then the back of my legs hit the quilt.

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