By the time they made it back to the house, her steps were dragging, and the sun was sinking low, taking the temperature with it. Exhausted, she lay down for a nap and woke only when Diaz shook her and told her it was time to eat.
The succeeding days passed like that, in a blur of grief and numbness, punctuated by bursts of rage. The sameness blended them all together in her tired mind, so it seemed as if time was merely creeping. She ate, she slept, she cried. The fits of rage would take her unawares, exploding when she least expected it, and afterward she was always ashamed of her lack of control. She screamed, she beat on the wall with her fists, she cursed the fate that had let her find her son, but too late.
She walked long miles on the deserted beaches, trying her best not to think of anything. At some point she realized she hadn’t called in to the office, and mentioned it to Diaz. “I called them,” he said. “When we were on our way here.”
She remembered very little about the trip, except being mired in hellish misery.
Some days she hated Diaz with an intensity that prevented her from even looking at him. Rage seethed through her, and the fact that they had both wanted the same thing for Justin in no way mitigated his actions. Keeping her from Justin hadn’t been his right, his decision. He seemed to know exactly what she was feeling on those days, because he would keep his distance from her, not speaking except for what was necessary when he called her for meals.
He made certain she ate and slept. He did the laundry, because the thought of it never even crossed her mind. She would hear the washing machine or the dryer running, and it meant absolutely nothing to her. It was just background noise. Clean clothes would reappear in her bedroom, and she would wear them. It was no more complicated than that.
One day she asked how long they’d been there, and he said, “Three weeks.”
The answer stunned her, shook her up a little. She stared at him without the dullness in her eyes that had characterized her over these past weeks. “But . . . what about Thanksgiving?” Her comment was stupid, but it was the only thing she could think of.
“They had it without us.”
Three weeks. That meant this was . . . the first week of December. “I don’t have anyone to have Thanksgiving with,” she blurted.
“You have your family.”
“I don’t spend holidays with them, you know that.” Then she fell silent, because she’d found Justin and she hadn’t called her mom, who might expect her to forget and forgive all concerning Ross and Julia, and she just couldn’t. Not yet. Whether she ever could remained to be seen.
Diaz shrugged. “Then you just spent your first Thanksgiving with me.”
Doing what? Screaming? Crying? Beating the wall? She hoped it wasn’t the start of a new tradition.
The days were very short now, and the temperature had dropped even more. Diaz brought her some thicker socks to wear when she was out walking. Being outside helped, even though the sunshine was weak. Staring at the ocean helped. Sometimes it was gray, sometimes it was blue, but it was a constant, immense presence.
The periods of rage became less and less frequent, as did the bouts of horrible, devastating weeping. She was so tired mentally and emotionally that she functioned within a very narrow range. She didn’t know what she would have done if Diaz hadn’t brought her here. She hated being beholden to him, but maybe this was his way of making amends. The thing was, she didn’t know if his efforts made any difference in the way she felt about him. She could only deal with one thing at a time, and right now was not his time.
Sometimes she tilted her face up to the winter sun in search of its meager warmth, and knew that she had survived.
28
Milla was always aware, on the dimmest edge of her consciousness, that Diaz constantly watched her. She also knew that he was a man who never gave up, who never lost sight of his goal. Exactly what his goal was wasn’t always clear to her, but she had no doubt he was perfectly clear in his own mind what he wanted.
He wanted her. She knew it, and yet she couldn’t imagine how they could ever be together again. The rift between them, to her, was final and absolute. He’d betrayed her in the most wounding way possible, and forgiveness evidently wasn’t her strong suit. She had found that grudges weren’t heavy at all; she could carry them for a very long time.
Diaz wasn’t taking care of her out of the goodness of his heart. He was taking care of her the way a wolf cared for its wounded mate.
She had sensed that claim the first time he made love to her, that bonding of like to like. He wouldn’t willingly relinquish it.
She knew she was in danger from him; she knew it. Not physically. Physically, Diaz wouldn’t harm her. But emotionally he could devastate her, and she didn’t think she could bear any more devastation right now. She knew she should start making a push to leave this little house that had seen the total breakdown of her soul and then the first tentative steps toward healing. Finders needed her. She needed to be doing something, anything, rather than vegetating. She needed to get away from Diaz. But insisting on anything took more mental energy than she could spare; she was so horribly tired of thinking, of feeling. She had her hands full just existing.
One day while Diaz was outside she actually tried to call Finders, just to check in with Joann, but she had evidently left her cell phone on when they came here and the battery was dead. Next she tried the house phone, and discovered that long distance calls were blocked on it. She sat staring at the phone, trying to remember her code for charging a call to her home phone, but the only number that came to mind was her social security number and she knew it wasn’t that.