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“It was only a matter of time before that idiot made a mistake,” Natalie said.
Rose pressed her lips together. “You know, I bought your old house.”
“I heard about that,” Natalie said.
“How?”
“I read about it,” Natalie said. “The news spits out stories about you and Oren and the Waldens every few minutes. Thank goodness I’m still labeled as ‘dead.’” She laughed and shook her head.
“I can’t believe he milked that sorrow about your death for so long,” Rose said. “He knew you didn’t die, obviously.”
“What could he do? He had to pay someone off,” Natalie said. “Otherwise, it looked like his wife just started a fire during an argument and ran out on him.”
Rose swallowed. “That’s what happened?”
Natalie nodded. “He was about to hit me. It’s not like he hadn’t done it before. I was so done. So exhausted. So when he wasn’t looking—I think he was crying about howI could never be the wife he really wanted—I set fire to the kitchen. Poof. It went up in flames.”
“How did it happen so quickly?” Rose asked.
“I might have had some gasoline in the kitchen,” Natalie said. “I might have planned the whole thing for weeks. I was just waiting for the time to strike.”
Rose took a sip of wine. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met.”
Natalie laughed. “I don’t know about that. I had to completely abandon everything. I abandoned my name and my friends. It wasn’t till a few weeks after my ‘death’ that I could contact my family and tell them I was safe. They totally freaked out, obviously. But we’ve been able to remain in contact all these years.”
“When did you get to Montana?”
“It took a while,” Natalie admitted. “I didn’t have much money, and I had to pick up a few odd jobs here and there to get enough cash to come west. I figured Montana was perfect.”
“He would never come out here,” Rose agreed.
“Never.”
They held the silence for a moment. Overhead, an eagle swooped, then perched in a tree that had to be one hundred feet tall.
“I met Graham when I was thirty-one,” Natalie said. Graham was her husband; they owned the ranch together. “I didn’t tell him what my real name was until about two years later. I was terrified. For some reason, I thought he was going to hit me. But he melted with sorrow. He held me in his arms and told me he would never let anything like that happen again.” Natalie's tears came after that. She didn’t bother to mop them up.
“I saw he’d married someone else,” Natalie said. “Ihated how young you looked in your photograph in the paper. It broke my heart, knowing what he was going to do to you. But you got out.”
“Eventually,” Rose said.
“And you didn’t even have to burn anything down,” Natalie said.
Rose cast her gaze to the ground. “I don’t know if I’ve ever really gotten over it.”
Natalie took her hand on the table. “I’m always here to talk to you. I get it.”
Rose pressed her lips together. She thought of Sean, waiting back in Nantucket for her. She thought about the tremendous density of the life she’d lived thus far. She raised her eyes to Natalie’s and said, “There’s life after Oren Grayson.”
“So much of it,” Natalie agreed. “I’m so grateful we had a chance to find it.”
