Chapter Forty-Nine
Maggie
When Ethan crawled in beside her and pulled her close, Maggie didn’t let herself think about how perfectly they fit together—how
their legs twisted and tangled and then clicked into place like her feet had always been the ice cream in the footsie sandwich.
She didn’t let herself wonder why she’d never felt that way with Colin. How she’d been so wrong before.
Ethan was just a space heater. A temporary ally. A friend? And soon the roads would thaw and the lights would come on and
Christmas would be over. It might even be a dream. So she closed her eyes.
“You know”—something warm and soft brushed against her temple—“to do the body heat thing properly we really should be naked.”
She hit him with a pillow, but he just laughed and pulled her closer, and Maggie sighed, marveling at the fact that it was
her least favorite night of the year and she was in bed with her least favorite person in the world. And she didn’t want to
be anywhere else.
“What?” Ethan’s chest rose and fell with the word.
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t a nothing sigh. That was an I’m freaking out, but I don’t know why, and Ethan is the last person I’d ever tell anyway sigh.”
“Wow. That’s a very intense sigh.”
“Magg—”
“Do you think Eleanor’s okay?” Maggie hadn’t actually meant to say the words, but they were out there now and she couldn’t
pull them back, so she focused on the slow sweep of his fingers through her hair, the rise and fall of his chest.
“I think”—his words were careful, measured—“that Eleanor Ashley has proved very hard to kill.”
It was true. She’d survived falls and fires, poison and poverty. If anyone could see the whole picture and spot the twist,
it was Eleanor. But Eleanor wasn’t there.
The wind howled and the fire crackled, and Maggie shivered from the sound.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “This probably wasn’t the Christmas you wanted.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t help but laugh. “This isn’t my worst Christmas. This isn’t even my coldest.” He pulled back and looked
down as she explained, “My senior year of high school the entire state lost power in an ice storm and we ended up having to
burn the fence.”
It was the humblest of brags, but she couldn’t help but giggle when he said, “ Nice. ” Those fingers were in her hair again, with their slow, steady sweep and Maggie had to bite her cheek to keep herself from
sighing.
“When I was ten, we moved from Germany to Oklahoma and every single dish we owned got broken in transit so we ate Christmas
dinner off a bunch of old Frisbees.”
“When I was seven, our garage caught fire and burned all our presents.”
“When I was nine, our living room caught fire because my mom’s cat chewed through the Christmas tree lights. No,” he added
before she could ask, “the cat didn’t die, but it did spend the rest of its life afraid of the color green.”
“When I was fourteen, my whole family got food poisoning from eggnog.”
“When I was twelve, two of my brothers had a fight with a Nativity set and one of them choked on the baby Jesus and had to
have an emergency tracheotomy.”
She smiled into his chest. “When I was twenty-one, my fiancé and my best friend sent me to get more wine, but the cellar door
slammed shut behind me and I got locked in for a day and a half.”
Suddenly, his chest was too still beneath her cheek. He wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t even entirely sure he was breathing.
“Maggie...”
“It wasn’t a big deal. They just thought I went to bed, I think.”
“You think ?”
“I mean, I was always going to bed before them or reading by myself. It was my fault—”
“Says who?”
“What?” She pushed up a little just to look at him.
“Who said it was your fault?” His voice was dark and low and colder than the wind.
“It wasn’t a big deal. The worst part was that the lights were on a timer and...” Sometimes Maggie could still hear the
sound of the waves breaking on the rocky shore that was just beyond a window that was far too high and far too small to crawl
through. She’d screamed herself hoarse and then she’d screamed so hard she didn’t make any sound at all. And, it turned out,
panic attacks weren’t something a person got better at with practice.
Ethan moved slowly as he looked at her. The room wasn’t totally dark, not with the fire. It was plenty bright enough to see
him—to watch a coldness fill his eyes as he realized—
“That’s why you don’t like small spaces.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.” Maggie was furious. Not with Ethan or even Colin. Maggie was mad at herself. It was a slip she knew
better than to make, so she tried to pull away, to turn, to change the subject or the day of the year or anything. “It wasn’t
that bad. I got dehydrated or something and passed out eventually so—”
“What do you mean ‘or something’? Didn’t they take you to the hospital?”
“Of course not.” She had to laugh. “Ethan, I was a twenty-one-year-old aspiring author. I didn’t exactly have insurance.”
“Any douchebag rich enough to have a wine cellar can cover the hospital bills of the girl who got locked inside it and almost
died.”
“I didn’t almost die.”
But she could have, and that’s the part Maggie never let herself think about. She could have died—not because she got locked in but because
no one had bothered to come looking.
“Maggie—”
But she couldn’t face him anymore. He saw too much, knew too much. She wanted to go back to being Marcie to him. Because that
was so much better than having him see her as she really was.
“Listen to me.” He was rolling toward her, eyes burning through the dark. “It wasn’t your fault. They should have come looking
for you. They should have taken you to the hospital. They should have... cared. They shouldn’t have blamed you, and they
sure as hell shouldn’t have let you blame yourself. If you were missing, I’d find you. I’d tear the house down stone by stone.
I’d rip apart every room and scour every field and I wouldn’t stop. I would never stop.”
He closed his eyes and rolled away, and she couldn’t decide if he was hating himself because he’d gone too far or because
he hadn’t gone nearly far enough.
“So yeah.” He blew out a tired breath. “This isn’t my worst Christmas either.”
And then Maggie remembered—the tunnel and the story and the scar. She was the idiot who was lying with her head on his bad
shoulder, and instantly, she pulled away.
“I’m so sorry. Did I hurt your arm or—”
“Oh, no, you don’t.”
He pulled her back, and for a moment there was silence beneath the howling wind and crackling fire. She could almost hear
his thoughts and would have given anything to know what they were saying. But the fingers were back in her hair and her limbs
were heavy and finally warm, and Maggie thought she might actually drift off to sleep. And maybe she did because when the
words came they were almost from a dream.
“When I was thirteen, my mom left for wrapping paper and didn’t come back.”
Maggie’s eyes sprang open but she willed her body not to move and the words went on, low and dark in the stillness.
“We were getting ready to move, packing up. But there were still boxes in the garage from the last move, and she couldn’t find the wrapping paper. That was it. My brothers were roughhousing and knocked over the tree, and
my dad...” The words trailed off, and his chest stopped moving. “She couldn’t find the wrapping paper, so she went to buy
some. She should have been back in an hour, but I guess she just kept driving because we got a letter a week later. She was
through. She couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I’m so sorry,” Maggie whispered.
“I don’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault. My father was— is —a hard man to live with. And there were five of us boys, and... It wasn’t her fault. She loved Eleanor Ashley.”
It took a moment for Maggie to hear the words, they’d been so unexpected. “Wait. What?” She pushed up onto an elbow and looked
down at him. And, amazingly, he was smiling—not at her. At a memory.
“They were the first grown-up books she ever let me read.”
“But you said...”
The little boy grin was back on his hot guy face again. “I lied.”
She pinched his side, but he just smiled. “They were our thing. Just my mom and me. She called it book club and my father...” The words turned cold and raw. “The week after she left, he burned them. They were all I had of her,
and...”
“Oh, Ethan...”
“No. Shh. Don’t cry for me, sweetheart.” His fingers were in her hair again, the slow steady sweep and Maggie realized it
was for him as much as it was for her. “A week later, I was in a new school in a new town, and it was like she never existed.
It was easier that way, honestly. Move on. Be someone new.”
Be. Someone. New. Maggie felt the words rattling around in her head. Like bells beginning to chime. Ringing out because, suddenly, the world
made sense. Ethan made sense.
He wasn’t some hot guy breezing through life with no worries and no burdens. He was the kid who had gone to ten schools in
twelve years. He was the boy who had looked at the parts of himself that were just like his mother; and then he’d watched
his father set those parts on fire.
Ethan wasn’t who people wanted him to be. He was who he needed to be to survive: someone charming and easy and cool. Someone
who makes friends and keeps the peace. The life of the party. The guy who gets invited back.
She’d heard at least a hundred theories about where Ethan Wyatt came from and who he really was, but in that moment Maggie
knew the only version of him that really mattered: he was the guy who takes the bullet and a warm and steady presence in the
dark.
“Ethan?”
His voice was groggy when he answered. “Yeah?”
“I want to make out.”