“You said you have two daughters?”
He nodded. “Cammy’s thirteen, Alexis is twelve. I miss them like crazy.”
Hailey sipped her coffee and wondered why he hadn’t stayed near them, in the suburbs, after his divorce.
As if he’d read her mind, he said, “They’re both away at boarding school in Massachusetts. My ex-wife insisted. It was her alma mater, and it’s a great school, the girls love it, so…” He shrugged. “No reason for me to stay in Westchester without them. How about you?”
She hesitated. Hailey couldn’t imagine sending children away to a boarding school. “Do you mean have I ever lived in Westchester?”
He smiled. “No, I mean, do you have children?”
Taken aback by the question, she shook her head quickly. “No.”
Maybe she’d answered it too quickly, because his smile faded just a little and he said, “You’re not into kids, huh?”
“No, that’s not it. I mean, I love children.” And she’d always thought she’d have them. It hadn’t turned out that way. It was still an open wound.
What was she doing here? It was all wrong.
Suddenly, all she wanted was to go home.
Hailey looked at her watch. “It’s getting late.”
“I guess it is.” Adam looked around for the waiter.
Five minutes later, they were outside. Adam raised his arm to flag a cab. “You said you live uptown, too, right?”
“I do, but I’ve got to go back over to the office and pick up some files I forgot.”
“We can swing by and I’ll wait,” he said, as a taxi pulled up to where they stood in the street.
“Oh, that’s okay. I need the walk, after all that food.”
“Right. Well…thanks for having dinner with me, Hailey.”
“Thanks for asking.”
He got into the cab with a wave and a “Talk to you soon.”
She started walking slowly toward the office, wondering whether he realized she hadn’t wanted to share a cab uptown with him.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t enjoyed his company.
For the first time in years, Hailey found herself wondering whether there might not be someone out there for her after all. Someone other than Will.
She didn’t like even thinking of it. She couldn’t wait to get out of the restaurant and felt like running the whole way back to her apartment. That was why she’d cut the evening short. The thought of dinners and dates and movies and theater with another man was just too much like…cheating. Cheating on Will. She knew it didn’t make sense, but the dinner with Adam was just…wrong.
But walking toward the avenue to look for a cab of her own, she decided Adam Springhurst wasn’t so terrible and could be a nice friend. She’d end it there. There was nothing wrong with Adam…he was absolutely fine, she told herself. Young, handsome, single, educated…he had a great résumé. Right? He looked great on paper. But Adam wasn’t the problem…maybe she was. She was sure of it. She couldn’t put her finger on why she suddenly had to get away…from him.
30
North Georgia
THE BUS WAS IN THE COUNTRY NOW, NO SIDEWALKS, NO streetlights…only the gradual incline of the foothills of the Piedmont, the beginnings of the Appalachians. The bus struggled and shifted to make the gentle upward slant.
The two-lane was a curvy old thing, built decades before during Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration.
Now it was whisking Cruise farther and farther north, neatly separating objects in the night…people, cars, motels, sturdy telephone lines split evenly on either side of the Greyhound.
Outside the bus, the night was magnetic.
Through tinted glass he could make out shapes of things his consciousness had forgotten during his years in maximum-security lockdown. Deep down in his bones, though, in the roots of his hair, in his very skin, he remembered it all.
Cruise peered out his window at trees, trailer parks, RV camps. Tired-looking cornfields and farmhouses were flying by in the night. Split-second images of countless grassroots churches spirited past the window of Cruise’s back-row seat. His eyes could barely focus on makeshift white crosses propped on the pointed centers of their roofs…roofs topping structures that had once passed for single-family homes, now converted to house sweaty Bible-thumpers every Sunday. It was all zooming by like a movie in fast-forward.
His right shoulder was pressed tight, hunched against the bus’s rectangular thermal-glass pane. For hours on end, rarely glancing away from the old two-lane, keeping his gaze reined in as tight as his posture. He wasn’t used to having unlimited freedom of motion yet. He intentionally positioned himself in the very back of the bus, last row.
He was drawn to the view out the window like a wolf to the moon.
His mouth was dry with the painful realization of all he had been denied during those years in a piss-stank Atlanta jail, followed by maximum at Reidsville Penitentiary. His neck tightened and his pulse quickened in the darkened corner there in the rear of the bus. His stomach churned. His hands clenched as he realized what that prosecutor-bitch had cost him.
The ride was getting long and they ground to a stop over and over in every bump in the road that had a stop sign. He was pissed and he couldn’t believe how these morons were slowing him down, actually boarding and unboarding at stops nobody else had ever seen or heard of…the middle of nothing and nowhere.
Cruise glared whenever new passengers-skittish women, sullen-looking teenaged boys-hopped onto the bus. He only noticed them to the extent they disturbed him…slowing his flight north.
The bus lurched again, then heaved to a halt, pushing the passengers forward in their seats.
Cruise peered out to see the pickup point here, a gas station with a single outside-lamp bulb hanging from a chain to light a wooden bench situated near the pumps.
“Blue Ridge, Georgia,” the driver called out in the dark of the bus.
Wouldn’t the good people of Blue Ridge just love it if tonight, Clint Burrell Cruise stepped down off the bus and decided to make this his new home?
Think they’d show up with a welcome basket tomorrow morning and invite him to Monday’s Rotary Club luncheon, packed with all the town’s do-gooders and held in the conference room of the local bank?
Maybe…until they found out about a little Murder One conviction on his résumé.
He knew better than to even think about it anyway. The more miles between him and Reidsville, the better for everybody.
Plus, there was a little business matter for him to take care of in the Big Apple.
He’d never actually been to the city before; had only seen it in the movies.
But already, he knew where to look up some of his old friends who were there, living just north of Harlem. Or at least, they had been.
A name change, a new ID, and he’d be just fine in New York. Plus, he didn’t plan to stay too long…just long enough.
He watched a new passenger, a spongy-looking girl, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, lumbering up the aisle toward him.
She came all the way to the back of the bus, dragging two purple canvas bags with her, covered in sewn-on stickers and Magic Marker scrawls.
She disgusted him.
She was too fleshy, wearing low-cut hip-hugger jeans. Her sandals revealed stubby toes in need of washing and still bearing the remnants of a bluish-tinted nail polish. A silver toe ring topped it all off. Repulsive.
She turned, and he spotted a large tattoo on the small of her back…some Chinese-looking characters, an unreadable word permanently burned into her flesh in thick greenish-black ink.