exception. The school was mostly empty now, but occasional footsteps moving in the halls gave her a reassuring feeling of not being alone as did the faint whirring and beeping of distant machines set to automatic timers.
Thank goodness the school term was almost finished and she’d been allowed to back out of teaching summer school this year. She loved the kids in her remedial classes at Blunt Falls High, but she needed time away from them and everyone else. Who would have guessed constant pity could be so exhausting? She closed her eyes and let her mind drift for a while.
A nearby noise jerked her out of her stupor and she looked up to find a stranger standing in her open doorway. As the school was very strict about allowing unauthorized people on the campus, this man had to be someone’s father, but he didn’t look like any other parent she’d met at this school. He was tall and dark, thin, with uncut hair and a full beard. Dark glasses covered his eyes. His jeans and corduroy shirt appeared too big for his frame, while his face and hands were weathered looking. There was a healed abrasion across one cheekbone and another slashing across what she could see of his forehead. As he moved into the class, she detected a definite hitch in his left leg.
She found herself on her feet without consciously deciding to rise. “May I help you?”
He took off the dark glasses, folding them away as he continued moving between the desks. The look in his hazel eyes pinned her to the floor and she all but stopped breathing as her throat closed.
And then he was right beside her, taking her hands, looking at her as though he’d never seen her before. He brought her right hand up to his face and laid her palm against his hairy cheek. His eyes sparkled with tears.
“Alex?” she murmured, searching his face with a disbelieving intensity. “Oh, my God. Alex?”
His nod was almost imperceptible. His tears moistened her fingertips. “Are you real or am I dreaming?” she mumbled.
“If you’re dreaming, then so am I,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.
She forgot to wonder how she would feel or react and just flung herself against him. Tears of relief filled her eyes as he held her. She finally pushed herself away. “How is this possible?” she asked. “Where have you been?”
He pulled her back against him, burying his face against her neck, holding her tight as if he’d never let her go. “I crashed in the Bitterroots,” he said. “I’ve just been trying to stay alive until the snow melted so I could get back.”
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “Or maybe even worse, that you...”
She stopped short.
“I can’t believe I’m holding you,” he whispered.
She leaned back to gaze up at him, smoothing his hair away from his brow with trembling fingers, trying to find the man she married under the scars and hair. “Are you all right? You’re limping. And your poor face.” She searched his eyes for answers.
Instead of providing them, he tugged her back to his chest, and this time his lips landed on hers. Even when times were tough between them, the physical connection had been quicksilver and so it still was, all the sweeter for the fact that until a few minutes before, she’d thought she’d never see him again.
A woman’s voice cut in from the open doorway and they both turned to find the school’s principal, Silvia Greenspan. “I’m sorry to interrupt you guys,” she said. It appeared she knew Alex was at the school, had probably spoken to him when he came onto the campus. She smiled at them both fondly as she added, “There are tons of reporters outside. Alex, I think someone in the office got excited and alerted the local television channel that you’d reappeared here at the school. I don’t know how long we can hold them back.” She turned and left, her footsteps clicking in retreat as she hurried back down the hall.
“How did you get to Blunt Falls?” Jessica asked.
“Doris and Duke Booker brought me. They’re the people who more or less rescued me.”
“Rescued you! Alex, what happened?”
“Later, okay?” He looked at her longingly. “There’s so much I need to tell you.”
“I know,” she said, her mind still grappling with his offhand comment about being rescued. “Me, too.”
“I’m sorry about the fight we had before I left. It was my fault.”
“Not now,” she said, straightening his collar. “You have to go talk to the press.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What do you mean, no? Everyone is going to be so relieved to hear you’re home safe and sound.”
“They can wait,” he said. He gestured at her cluttered desk. “Anything here need to go home with you?”
“These tests,” she said, picking up the math papers she’d been grading. He retrieved her briefcase from the closet and held it open for her as she deposited the papers. “Why are we running away?”
“Because,” he said, sounding like one of her students. “There’s a back way out of here through the gym, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing,” he interrupted as he took her jacket from her chair and draped it over her shoulders. “Where’s your purse?”
“I’ll get it,” she said as she unlocked the desk drawer where she kept it during classes. “Why don’t you want to talk to the newspeople? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, not like that. I just think we have the right to reconnect before the blitz. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, suddenly realizing he was right. There were so many things she had to tell him about the past three months, things he needed to understand, things that would redefine what he thought he knew about the world, things she didn’t want him hearing from someone holding a camera on his face. And, she realized with a jolt of panic, there were things she needed to take care of, too. Things she didn’t want him to see.
She followed him toward the door, his limp a visual reminder of the struggle he must have endured. “Hurry,” she added as they raced down the hall and out the back of the gym toward the baseball field, which they could circle to access the parking lot.
It was a tremendous relief to slide behind the wheel of her car. “Duck your head,” she muttered, driving out of the lot. Their path led them past two or three television vans with satellite dishes on their roofs and a growing crowd of people milling about. Alex didn’t sit up again until they were half a mile away and she gave him the all clear. Their gazes met and he smiled but she knew it wouldn’t be long before reporters figured out they’d slipped away.
And it wasn’t as though they’d be hard to find.
* * *
“NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED,” Alex said in wonder as he followed Jessica into the house and closed the front door behind them. It seemed surreal that for the past one hundred and three days he’d been living in the most primitive of conditions while his wife, his house, his job—his world—existed right here as it always had. At the time,
