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  I nodded and also made a point to let the disappointed look on my face linger a bit. “Well, I’ll get mine to you as soon as I can. Do you at least know when this other person is supposed to bring you the money?”

  “Sorry, but no. Of course, you have an edge now; they don’t know that there is another interested party. Maybe they’ll take their time.”

  “Maybe…,” I said, but I was already deflated. The motivation I had felt just a few minutes ago (after leaving the stuffiness of the bank, of course) was gone. It had been replaced by an emotion I couldn’t quite name. Whatever it was, it made me feel foolish and I didn’t like it at all.

  “Thanks.” I turned towards the door.

  “Sure thing,” Mr. Tanner said.

  I left his shop, at odds with the fact that I was placing some of my anger on Mr. Tanner. He knew me well. He knew the crap I had gone through in the last few years with the divorce and nearly losing the shop. He knew I was a dependent and reliable person. It made me wonder who the other person was and what sort of relationship they might have with Mr. Tanner.

  But that avenue led me towards a pity party…something I was not about to allow myself to do. So I did what I had been doing ever since I had suddenly found myself single again four years ago: I bottled it up and acted like I didn’t care. I went back to work and chiseled out the rest of the day, unable to get my mind off of that damned plane.

  ****

  I locked the front door to the Pine Way at 4:59, giving myself the one extra minute of freedom as a reward. It had been a slow afternoon and after I had gone through inventory lists, swept the floors and restocked a few shelves, I had ended up leafing through an old fashion magazine that I had already been through a dozen times.

  I went home quickly and was fortunate to catch green lights the entire way. The drive from the shop to my house was less than ten minutes and, truth be told, I could have walked it in twenty or so. But the urge to walk just hadn’t been in me that morning. It hadn’t been in me for a while, actually. Some girls could pull off the whole walker/runner thing. Some of them looked cute with their ponytails and pretentious little calorie counters on their wrists. Others just looked flat out sexy with their sheen of sweat on their collarbones and upper chest, their awesome bodies perfectly outlines through outfits that were nearly a size too small.

  I fell into neither of those categories. I just looked like a bored, average looking woman that was in no particular hurry. Plus, I had done a lot of walking and jogging after the divorce and I didn’t want people to associate my walking with some sort of depression. I was well aware that I was over thinking it all, but that’s just the way my brain works.

  The way I saw it that afternoon as I pulled my car into my garage at 5:08 was that driving allowed me to get home quicker. I wasted no time, kicking my shoes off in the living room and made my way to the kitchen. I opened the fridge, pulled out the white wine and poured a glass. I sipped hard on it as I looked across the wide open space of the living room. A breakfast bar separated the kitchen from the living room. The high ceilings made it appear bigger—and feel emptier.

  I grabbed the TV remote from the bar and flipped on the TV, clicking over to the input that allowed me to pull up the web browser. I went to favorites, pulled up Pandora, and was listening to Norah Jones ten seconds later. With the soothing music playing, I decided that I would skip what would likely be a small and hastily-thrown together dinner, and make myself work on my novel.

  My novel was a private thing. No one knew I was writing one. It was a project three years in the making. I had never been the best writer, but a friend of mine had recommended it when I had been having a hard time with the divorce. She had also recommended that I drink when I write because it would lessen my inhibitions and I’d be more willing to write about things that were painful.

  I masked my agony in the guise of fiction. Whether or not it was worth a damn, I wasn’t sure. But it was cathartic, it was fun and, deep down, I actually thought it was pretty good.

  So I spent that afternoon writing. I sat at the small desk that I had tucked into the far corner of the living room, and started working. It was one of those empowering stories that I usually just glossed over in bookstores. Part of me wondered if I might actually summon up the nerve to send it to agencies and publishing houses. It seemed like some delusional fantasy, but I thought it might be worth a short anyway.

  I wrote for two hours, stopping for one primary reasons. I couldn’t ignore the rumbling in my stomach any longer. Slightly tipsy (on my third glass of wine), I wandered into the kitchen and threw together a ham and cheese sandwich. I ate it while standing at the counter, looking to the laptop on my desk and mulling over the second reason I had stopped writing.

  The next pivotal scene was about one page away and was looking to be a sex scene. I was not an erotica writer and even writing about a simple kiss is an earlier chapter had caused me to blush. The sex scene was going to be done tastefully and, if I could manage, maybe even artfully. But still… I hadn’t been with a man in that capacity in nearly four years. Writing about sex, I figured, was just going to depress me.

  Get over yourself, I thought. If you want to get laid that bad, just head down to the Salty Dog, grab a spot at the bar, and start flirting.

  As tempting as one night of raucous sex was, it also made me remember the few morning-afters I’d suffered through in college. I’d like to think I had more dignity that that these days.

  With my mind on this course as I ate my sandwich and slurped out the remainder of my third glass of wine, I started to think about the man that had come into the store earlier in the day… Jack. He’d been hot in a weird rugged sort of way. And I hadn’t been absolutely certain of it, but I thought that he had been flirting with me at one point. I thought about his face and wondered what he might look like if he shaved his goatee. I had nothing against them per se, but while they did look good on some men, I had never liked kissing a man with a ton of facial hair. I also wasn’t a fan of the way it scratched certain areas of my body, particularly the ones that were usually covered by clothing.

  I realized that my cheeks were red and I was starting to feel…well, squirmy. I put the wine glass in the sink, cautious of what a fourth glass would do to me. Four years, I thought. Has it really been that long?

  The idea of heading down to the Salty Dog became all the more appealing. So, before I could act on those instincts, I changed into my pajamas: a tank top and a pair of sweat shorts that had been with me since my college days.

  I grabbed a glass of water, cut the music off, and vegged out in front of the TV. I flipped through the channels, watching snippets of syndicated reruns like How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. I ended up stopping on one of those gossip shows that seemed to forever be on those channels near the end of my subscribed channels—the ones usually spouting off the latest exploits of Lindsay Lohan or the Kardashians.

  I wasn’t one of those women… I could care less about the lives of spoiled and entitled celebrities. But every now and then, as bad as it sounds, I’d check out these sorts of shows just to make myself feel better. If these famous glitzy people could make train wrecks of their lives, then certainly there was hope for me. I’d been keeping busy at the store and with the novel lately, so it had been a while since I’d indulged in this guilty pleasure.

  I watched through the usual butt-smooching stories about how a mediocre actress was supposedly the next big thing. I also watched an interview with a kid that the media was billing to be the next Justin Bieber. And then they got into the good stuff: a celebrity marriage that ended in divorce in less than six months, an actor getting arrested for cocaine possession, and an actor that had seemingly just disappeared.

  This last one was interesting. The way the show painted it made it seem like the story was something that should have been on Unsolved Mysteries. They showed a few cheesy slow motion shots of a smiling Devlin Stone during interviews and press junkets. He was one of t
hose men that looked like he fell out of his mother’s womb with six pack abs and good looks.

  I knew his story well enough and absolutely loathed him because of it: he was a war hero and was plastered on every newspaper and magazine cover for months. When he came back from Afghanistan, America fawned over him and he let it go to his head. He sold his heroic soul to Hollywood and became nothing more than fodder for these shows. I had seen a few of his movies. He was a decent actor and rather good looking, but that’s where it stopped. He had quickly become typecast in the same roles the movies had kept getting worse and worse.

  That’s just my opinion, anyway. I was more of a Chris Evans kind of girl. Not that he’s necessarily the best actor in the world either, but that’s beside the point.

  The show was telling the story of how Devlin Stone had been missing for roughly six weeks. He’d last been seen at the red carpet premiere of Killing Floor and had then simply disappeared. Aubrey Henning, an actress that was a few decent roles away from becoming a Hollywood mainstay, was the last person to have seen him. As the show played a clip of the two of them kissing on the red carpet, there was a voice over from the actress where she sounded both irritated and sad.

  The reporter wrapped up and I was rather disgusted that I found myself intrigued by the story. “With his agent and closest friends unable to contact him, the worse is starting to be assumed,” the reporter said. “His accountant is keeping an eye on his finances, hoping that maybe activity there might clue someone in as to where Devlin Stone might be. More on this fascinating story as it develops.”

  Rolling my eyes, I shut off the TV. Probably a publicity stunt, I thought. Of course, I wasn’t being fair to Devlin Stone. I was holding him to the standards of other military men I had known: my grandfather, my father, and my brother.

  My brother had died in combat. It was one of the reasons my divorce has been so brutal. I lot my brother and my husband within eleven months of one another. Granted, I often wished it had been my ex-husband that would have caught the brunt of a bullet instead of my brother, but they were just as equally gone to me.

  Angry, I toyed with the idea of getting another glass of wine before I went to bed. I decided against it, though. I sat in bed for a while, reading a book about the history of Iceland (it was research for my novel) until my eyes started to burn.

  I shut off my lamp and lay in bed in my quiet bedroom, in my empty house. I thought of my brother, as I usually did whenever I was sad or upset about anything. He’d been four years younger than me and the last time I had seen him before he died, we’d had an argument.

  I thought of him, all smiles and that one little dimple in his left cheek. I missed him terribly. That, coupled with the empty side of the bed next to me, made me feel miserable. It made me want to just sink down into the sheets and drown. You’d think four years would be enough to get used to an empty bed and that nearly five years would be enough to get over a dead brother, especially one that was in the military.

  But some things were beyond getting used to. It didn’t help that I also lived in one of the most desolate states in the country. But Alaska had defined me, as had the horrid events of the last five years.

  And the only thing that kept me from submitting to total misery and depression was the idea that I was not yet finished being defined.

  That thought clicked in my head as I drifted off to sleep and, for some reason, pulled up an image of Mr. Tanner’s float plane. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

  6—Devlin

  It was six-thirty in the morning when I crested the gentle rise in the land and came to the top of a hill in the forest. The sunrise looked like something out of one of the romantic films I’d been in two years ago, painting everything in yellow and gold tones, from the tops of the fjords to the crests on the water. I stopped, taking a moment to appreciate it. I stood motionless, soaking in the light and the fact that although there might be other hikers on this particular trail, I felt like I was the only person around within miles.

  The truth of the matter was that my cabin and all of the other cabins on Moose Hill were less than two miles behind me. I had set out at five o’clock with a large backpack and the map of hiking trails I had gotten from The Pine Way the day before. I had spent the previous night pouring over the maps and thought I had a decent route selected. My plan was to reach a place called Catchman’s Overlook by six o’ clock and set up a small tent. I would sleep there tonight and then walk back to Moose Hill.

  It would be a nice little two day excursion. My cabin offered solitude, sure, but there was nothing like being out in the wilderness by myself. I had some experience with it, having gone on a few camping trips with some friends after we graduated high school. And of course, there had a few nights of roughing it in some less than desirable locales while I had served in the army. Compared to the rugged Afghanistan landscape, the Alaskan wilderness was a piece of cake.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what it was about solitude that so appealed to me. I was certain that I did my best thinking while alone; in fact, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works with most people. I had always heard about people going somewhere isolated to get in touch with themselves. I’d always found the idea cheesy but, deep down, thought there might be something to it. Figuring it was worth a shot, I thought I might as well see what sort of inner insights I could come to while alone in the Alaskan woods.

  I’d read somewhere that some famous poet had gone into the forest and simply sat down, unmoving for twelve hours, taking it all in. While I didn’t quite plan on going to such extremes, I did find the task admirable.

  Within an hour of starting my trek, I found it both cool and eerie that there were so many hiking trails in these woods. Many of them skirted with the edges of several cliffs that looked out into the sea. Other wove deep into the heart of the forest where they meandered into several other trails. While I hadn’t taken the time to count each and every one of the map, I felt certain that there were more than forty in all.

  It took a while, but I finally cleared my mind. I wasn’t thinking about agents or opening nights or cute actresses. I also wasn’t thinking about the lure and lights that Hollywood had snared me with when that first movie studio had come calling two months after my first television interview about my so-called heroics in Afghanistan.

  I guess to someone on the outside looking in, what I did probably did seem heroic. But I had a hard time thinking of it that way. If I had have been heroic, maybe more of my group would have made it out of the ambush alive.

  I still dreamed about that day—about that hellish forty minutes of my life—over and over again. Aubrey knew a little bit about it, but I hadn’t gone into great detail. All she knew was what she had seen on the news; she had seen the same story that the rest of the American public had seen.

  The gist of it, according to the pretty little American network news spin, went like this: a platoon of American troops had been sent in to rescue a dozen children from a school that had partially collapsed due to being in the crossfire of a battle. In getting to the area where the school was located, a roadside bomb had obliterated one of the three trucks carrying the troops, knocking the original twenty-one troops down to a scant twelve. Those men had swept into the school to rescue the children. All twenty-four school children had been rescued but, in the process, all but one of the American troops had died.

  That troop had been Devlin Stone, an unremarkable young man from Maine that had barely made it out of high school with no intent of going to college. I had always thought the story wouldn’t have been quite as primed for headline news if I hadn’t have taken it upon myself to go back into the zone to look for survivors.

  That was the detail the media had harped on. It hadn’t been the twenty-four kids being rescued—it had been the fact that even after the mission could have been considered a success, I had gone back into the line of fire (catching a bullet in my shoulder and one below my collar bone as a result) to look for s
urvivors. I found one of my teammates but he had been so badly wounded that he died before receiving proper medical attention.

  The haze of that mission swept through my head like a strong wind in the desert. So much for having my mind cleared to enjoy the scenery.

  It was good, though. I needed to get it all out. It was sort of like sweating during a workout. You get a good rhythm going, get your exercise in, and then break a sweat to release all the nasty toxins in your body. That’s sort of what my hike was like, I guess. Only, rather than toxins and sweat, I was trying to rid myself of the memories and decisions that haunted me.

  I stopped along the edge of one of the trails by seaside cliffs and had a lunch that consisted of graham crackers, two GoBars, and water. When I unwrapped the GoBars, I thought of the cute woman at The Pine Way—Mac, her name had been.

  That’s got to be short for something, right? I wondered. Maybe I need to make a point to ask her.

  It was a nice thought, for sure. Not knowing anything about a woman made it much easier to assume things about her. As I munched on the GoBars, I wondered what sort of date Mac would like. What sort of music did she like? What were her hobbies?

  It might be nice to have a conversation with a woman that didn’t have all of the American public, not to mention reporters and the paparazzi, eating out of her hand. It had been a while since I had enjoyed that sort of real conversation with a woman. Dating had been out of the question when I had been snared by Hollywood. I was not about to be one of those people who had their faces all over magazines just for going out to have some Thai food with a woman I was maybe sort of interested in.

  Aubrey had been the closest I had come to dating. At first, I’d started seeing her because, quite honestly, it was nice to know that I could still manage to land a woman ten years younger than me. I kept seeing her, unofficially, because she was beautiful. She’d landed the cover of Maxim earlier in the year and it had sold more copies than any other edition of the magazine in the last ten years. She was gorgeous and, when the cameras weren’t flashing, actually very smart.