Chapter Forty-One
Maggie
Maggie had never liked dark places or tight quarters. Anything underground or too confined. Maybe it was the experience Colin
had dubbed The Wine Cellar Incident . Or maybe it was the result of a childhood spent in tornado alley and too many late spring afternoons in a root cellar that
smelled like damp earth and old cobwebs. (And snakes. But Maggie tried very, very hard not to think about the snakes.)
So she wasn’t sure what to expect when the door swung closed behind them and the air turned heavy with dust and the faint
traces of something she had started thinking of as Essence of Ethan. It was dark and broody and disgustingly good. They could
probably sell it at department stores. Spritzers would wear leather jackets and they’d sell out every Christmas.
She watched him turn back to the hidden entrance and try to force it open, but the door stayed closed and the corridor stayed
dark and all Maggie could do was stand there, way too still in the silence.
“So assuming I wasn’t wrong...” she started slowly.
“You weren’t wrong.”
“And Eleanor wanted us to find this...”
“She did.”
“Why?”
There was a thin strip of light from the hallway, slicing over the face of a man who was looking at her like this was it.
Like he was all in. Like he was all in... with her. And it was too much. This feeling that things were about to get good.
Because things weren’t good. A man was clinging to life and a woman was missing and if Maggie knew anything, it was that good didn’t last and the best you could hope for was okay .
Okay was fine.
Okay was bearable.
Okay was a nice, slow ride around a flat, even track—no angst-ridden climbs or terrible falls. A high-free, low-free existence
and it was all she wanted.
But she looked up at him. She breathed him in. And the words came again, ricocheting around the narrow space: This is getting good...
And when Ethan said “Do you trust me?” and held out his hand, Maggie didn’t even have to think before she took it.