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“Learn anything?”
“No. Nothing new. And that’s enough of it for tonight.”
“Was this light bothering you?”
“No,bébé, you know that light doesn’t bother me.”
“I know you say it doesn’t.”
“Because it doesn’t,” he insisted. “I kind of like it now, truth to tell. I can look over and watch you sleeping.”
“In the rare event I do,” she said.
He could hear the strain of frustration in her voice. She had struggled with sleep since her head injury, a primitive part of her brain fighting to keep her from fully letting go of consciousness. The resulting exhaustion only added fuel to the anxiety that never seemed to entirely go away. Keeping a soft light on seemed to help somewhat with getting her to sleep, so that was what they did, but Annie took it as a sign of some kind of weakness and rode herself for it unnecessarily.
“Come here, you,” he whispered, reaching for her. She snuggled in against him, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder. He kissed her hair. “My little puzzle piece,” he murmured, tightening his arms around her. “You were out pretty good there for a while.”
“Yeah. God forbid my brain should let me get away with that for too long.”
“Don’t be so hard on your brain,chère. It thinks it’s doing the right thing, keeping you safe.”
“I keep telling it I’m good now, that I’m not gonna die if I go to sleep. It’s not listening.”
“It’s only as stubborn as you are,” Nick said. “Don’t fight with it so hard.”
“I’m just so tired of it.”
“I know,bébé. But it will pass. You have to be a little more patient with yourself, that’s all.”
“I’m not good at that,” she admitted. “I feel like such a burden, and it’s all my own fault.”
“You have to let that go, ’Toinette,” he said quietly, pulling back and tipping her chin up to look in her eyes. “You can’t blame yourself for something someone else did. That woman made her own choices that night. You don’t need to keep paying for them. She’s the one going to prison. You don’t need to go with her. Let that go.”
“That’s easier said than done,” she whispered. “I made my choices, too, that night.”
“What good does it do to punish yourself?” he asked. “None. No one else is keeping score. What happened happened. It can’t be changed now, and you can’t move forward if you’re only looking back.”
“How’d you get to be so wise?” she asked with a crooked little smile.
“The hard way. The universe had to knock it into my head with a ten-pound hammer,” he confessed. “I’m trying to save you the experience.”
“Thank you,” Annie murmured. “You turned out okay.”
“I married well,” he said, smiling back at her. “It made me a better man.”
She leaned up and pressed her lips to his. “I love you.”
“Je t’aime, mon coeur. Tu es mon coeur,” he whispered. “Go to sleep, now,chère. I’ll keep you safe.”
She sighed, and the tension left her body as she slowly drifted off, and Nick fell asleep counting her heartbeats.
14
The morningsky was thecolor of a dove’s wing, backlit by the diluted yellow of a hidden sun. From a distance, the water looked like mercury, rippling quicksilver, moved by the unseen hand of God…or a school of fish, or the sudden departure of a wood duck. Same thing, really, Nick thought.
He spotted Luc Mercier’s truck parked on the water side of the property, near the small cabin-like building from which the Merciers ran their tour operation. He breathed a sigh of relief, wanting to avoid Kiki for the moment. She would be angry and impatient at his lack of information, a mood probably exacerbated by a hangover, but investigations seldom ran at a pace that satisfied the family and friends of victims—if indeed Marc Mercier was a victim of anything.
He turned in the driveway and pulled alongside the black truck, noting that it was no longer spotless and spit shined as it had been the day before. Now it was coated with a fine white dust. Someone had drawn a smiley face on the rear quarter panel.
