Diaz came in and noticed her sitting beside the phone. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to call the office.”
“Why?” he asked simply.
She stared at him, because the answer seemed obvious to her. “Because it’s been over three weeks and I need to check in.”
“They’re doing okay without you.”
“How do you know?” she asked with a flash of irritation.
“I called.”
“When? Why didn’t you let me talk to Joann?”
“I’ve called a couple of times, once to let them know where we are and another time to say we’d be here a while yet.”
She noticed he had totally ignored her question about talking to Joann. “It’s time to go home.”
He rubbed his neck. “Not yet.”
“Yes, it is!” To her surprise, she began crying. She said, “Damn it,” and went to her bedroom. She hadn’t cried in a couple of days, not even about Justin, so why was she crying now over something so inconsequential? This just proved Diaz right, and she didn’t want him to be right. She wanted to have something to do, to get back into a routine where she would have to think about something besides her own misery.
Did she really want to fly home if a flight attendant asking her if she wanted peanuts might easily reduce her to a sobbing heap?
After an hour of wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, she decided to take a walk before dark. She put on two pairs of socks and her coat; when she emerged from the short hallway, Diaz looked up and said, “Where’re you going?”
“For a walk,” she replied. Wasn’t it obvious? Then she opened the back door and realized why he’d asked. A slow, steady, gray rain was falling. She checked the clock on the wall and discovered the time wasn’t as late as she’d thought; it was the low cloud cover that made the day so dark. “Or not,” she said with a sigh.
He turned on the gas-log fireplace in the living room, and the coziness of it drew her. She didn’t want to sit in there with him, but the alternative was to return to her bedroom and stare at the four walls. The television was on satellite, which meant there was a multitude of channels available. To her surprise, Diaz was watching a decorating show on the Home and Garden Television channel with all the puzzlement of someone from another planet, as if he couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to glue tasseled fringe to a lamp shade.
“Are you thinking of taking up interior decorating as an alternate career?” she asked, surprising both of them by initiating the conversation.
“Only if someone holds a gun to my head.”
Milla surprised herself again by smiling. It was just a tiny smile, and it vanished immediately when she realized with astonishment what she’d done.
A smile, when she’d thought she would never smile or laugh again. He hadn’t noticed, but she had. She curled in a chair and watched the rest of the program with him, but the rain made her sleepy and she dozed on and off for the rest of the afternoon.
They ate an early supper; then Milla showered while Diaz took a last turn around the property. There was no threat for him to guard against, but watchfulness was ingrained in his nature, and every night he walked around checking to make certain the Jeep was locked up and no strangers were lurking around. They were the only strangers on the Outer Banks at this time of year, but that made no difference to him.
Milla had just pulled on her nightgown when the bathroom door opened without warning and Diaz said, “Put your coat and shoes on and come outside.”
Without question, spurred by the urgency in his tone, Milla hurried to put on her coat over her nightgown and slip her bare feet into her shoes. She stepped out onto the back porch with him and said, “Oh!” in hushed delight.
The rain had changed over to snow flurries. There was no chance of having an accumulation; the temperature, cold as it was, was still above freezing and the ground was still too warm and too wet. But the snow looked magical, swirling down out of a black sky.
Diaz looked down at her sockless feet, shook his head, then simply swung her up in his arms and went down the steps with her. Milla automatically clutched his shoulders for support. “Where are we going?”
“To the beach.”
He carried her over the low dunes to the beach, right to the ocean’s edge, and stood there in the darkness, the silence broken only by the rhythmic rush of the waves. Tiny snowflakes swirled around them and disappeared as soon as they touched down. She had grown up accustomed to seeing snow every winter, but since moving to El Paso snow was generally something she saw only if she was traveling. She certainly hadn’t expected to see it here, on a southern beach. She started shivering almost immediately, but she didn’t want to go inside and miss a minute of this.
The snow shower was of short duration, and after it ended she spent several minutes staring up at the black sky waiting for more, without success. “I guess that’s it,” she said, and sighed.
Diaz’s arms tightened around her, and he carried her back into the house.
Milla went to bed soon afterward and went right to sleep. Since coming here she had slept twice as much as she normally did, as if her body was trying to make up for years and years of erratic hours and unending stress, and also to give her battered mind a rest. Her dreams were slowly becoming more normal, so she didn’t wake up crying every night. She wasn’t dreaming at all that night when she started abruptly awake to find a dark shadow looming over her, and a naked, heavy weight pressing down on her.