EPILOGUE

The reception room surrounds me. It is done in taupe and sea blue. It is supposed to be soothing but it is far too neutral to be anything but annoying.

There is a box of tissues on the tables that are on either side of the couch. I sit there, inviting the catatonia to overtake me again, and wonder about the tissues.

Does anyone cry before they go into the inner office where the psychiatrist waits to pry their secrets from them? Is that the secret behind these tissue boxes out here? Do they cry in anticipation of the pain of revelation? I never have.

Not once in six months.

Yes, it's been six months and it still can surprise me that it's been this long.

The first thing my psychiatrist asks me, when she comes to the door of the reception area and smiles as if it's yet again a surprise that I turn up on time for my appointment, is the same thing as always.

"How have you been this week, Grace?"

"Good. Coping."

And the last thing she says to me, when she escorts me to the door of the exit area, is the same thing she says once a month. "Beth has your new prescriptions. She'll give them to you as you check out."

"Thanks. I'll fill them on the way home."

This is my life. I can't even feel it any more than I can feel my fingers most days.

It is not what it once was, my life ... not what I thought it would ever be. It has been, in many ways, much worse than I could have imagined it would be to come home.

The psychiatrist always asks me about my dreams and I made one up today, just for her. We did a bit of regression hypnosis. As usual when we do that, she asked me what I remember of that night and I said ... I say ... I said my memory still only starts with me cutting the Sheriff. And then I remember running away. I have never told her anything else I remember of that night. But today, I told her I remember a man in handcuffs but don't know when that was.

Of course, that was a lie.

My memories, they have told me so many times, do not jive with their reconstruction of the crime scene. It never matters what I say anymore and I am always tired of having to fight the conflicting need to feel punished for my betrayal and the need to be treated fairly for what I did to survive.

Justice and retribution have no place in this. They were sacrificed almost from the first moment I returned to civilization. It is a farce that I never recognized until I was in the middle of this kind of investigation. Everyone has an agenda ... everyone is crooked. Someone told me that once ... if my memory is any good at all, it was Ben Wade who said it, only I didn't believe him then. Why didn't I? Because that was when I refused to let go of my convictions about duty and right vs. wrong.

I gave a relatively full accounting of that night, long ago. While I shivered under blankets in a Tucson emergency room after being driven there in an ambulance from Double Adobe because I was terrified to be taken to any hospital in Cochise County. FBI agents took my statement. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, I remember that. I remember them putting a cell phone against my ear and Jeannette was talking to me, saying she was on her way. This was when I finally roused myself and answered questions.

My words, my accounting have been used against me, time and time again. So has the report on my physical exam, which showed recent sexual activity that Jeannette told me later the FBI felt was consensual. The semen they found was not the Sheriff's, she said. I remember that I was looking out the window of a "facility" where they sent me for a while. When she told me that bit about the semen, they had me pretty doped up and I may not have remembered this conversation with her well. I think my only reaction was to shake my head. She said they could all go fuck themselves if they could not cut me some slack.

But she never has understood why I won't talk about him, even to her.

On one side, I have people like the psychiatrist and my attorney, who absolve me of nearly all guilt because I was a hostage and therefore anything I did was in survival mode. They have all sorts of syndromes they have assigned to me. And on the other side, the one with real power, are the people who say that I am as guilty as Ben and his gang, that I was their accomplice, that I aided in murder and robbery, that I helped known fugitives escape and that I still am covering their tracks.

Victim or criminal.

It seems a choice must be made. They won't accept that I might be both because it makes it sloppy for them and their agenda. I am not a person but a convenient hook on which to hang so much and help them clear this up in a way that makes them appear to have done far more than they have.

It is not about justice as I perceive it. It is about scoring points between the various law enforcement jurisdictions. And looking tough to the press in a notorious crime spree case.

Now, I find that the idea of telling the truth and believing there is justice in the system do not jive with my reconstruction of how I've been treated.

If I were not now under the psychiatrist's treatment, continually doped up on instructions that I think may come from my attorney, I am convinced I'd already be on trial as an accessory to murder. But as it is, when these squabbling agencies interview me now, they see that I am barely functioning much less able to be paraded before a grand jury who may feel too much sympathy for me.

I have only one consolation ... and that is, I told the truth about what I was willing to admit I remembered. And that I survived. It isn't much.

The company feels they have done right by me. They figure giving me medical retirement, in light of the 'trauma' that happened 'on the job' is ample payment of their obligation to me. Jeannette has never forgiven them for not paying the ransom. I figure this is their way of keeping me sweet. They no longer trust me.

We all win, I guess, with this decision.

Jeannette drives me in every week for the visits to the shrink. She doesn't think I should drive with all the drugs in my system. We are both diminished by how little we trust each other anymore.

She is waiting for me in her car as I leave the doctor's building. I find it hard to be around her. In fact, I really don't like being around people anymore. She pretends not to notice. She drives me to the drugstore near the lake. And waits while I fill the new prescriptions for the various drugs the psychiatrist says will help me over this 'rough patch' of dealing with the aftermath.

At the small lakeside cabin Jeannette found for me to rent, she lets the car idle in the driveway. She has work to do, for she still has a job. She asks if I need any errands run before she heads back to the office. I say I am good.

I stand on the front porch and watch her drive off. Inside the cabin, I wander room to room, looking for my book. And after I find it, I put a pill on my tongue, drink some water. Then settle in the lounge chair on the enclosed back porch with the book in my hands. I can see the lake through the trees. Sometimes as I wait for one of the pills to kick in, I think about how odd it is that there is so much water around here. It seems wasteful.

The thing about the days I see the psychiatrist is this: they make me think about it all again. She wants to delve into my childhood to understand me. I only go to her because my attorney says that as long as I'm under treatment, he can keep me from being extradited back to Arizona to stand up for the charge in the Sheriff's murder. Besides, I couldn't get through life anymore without the pills. Ironically, she is part of the reason I need them.

It annoys me that she wants to talk about ancient history. Doesn't it strike her that my recent history is more than enough to keep her occupied for a while trying to help me move beyond it? To help me understand what I did and did not do? To help me as I struggle to find a new life beyond being defined by this ordeal?

I have become very confused about what really happened and what didn't. Even that last night is now mired in confusion. In my heart, I believe he would not have killed me. Jeannette says he only let me live because I ran into the desert and he didn't have the time to track me down if he was going to get away after the Sheriff's car exploded and maybe drew witnesses. Honestly, my memory is that I stayed on the highway.

To others, my guilt hinges on two things. One is that the Sheriff may have been dead before the gunshots to his chest and head, which my lover may have delivered to cover that it was me who did the murder. The fire destroyed so much evidence. The second is that I refused to talk to anyone for many hours, long enough to assure my lover could cross the border before anyone knew who to look for or where he'd gone.

It amuses me as to how they always refer to him when they want to eat away at my confidence that I have remembered this well ... they call him my lover.

But these long months later, I realize that sometimes this is how I think of him. Mostly though, I have come to remember he is a killer. He has become a caricature in my brain, broadly drawn with exaggerated aspects to denote surface attributes.

The pills make the days smoother for me. I have one I take at night that makes the dreams formless and forgettable. I have one I take in the morning to lift the fog of the one from the night. I have two I take during the day because they keep me from getting anxious.

The one I have just taken is a nighttime pill but I sometimes need one after coming back from the psychiatrist. It isn't only the visit to her, however, that is why I am taking the pill now.

Today, there is something worse that I want to zone out and forget. It's the personal ad I found in the morning newspaper.

I read the personal ads every day since I've been back home. It has to do with the odd way they initiated negotiations for the ransom. I hear Ben's voice telling Jeannette for them to watch out for the contact in the personals. Why I've fixated on this, I don't know ... I've never mentioned it to the psychiatrist because it is like some secret I won't give up. I like to think that I have simply become curious about what other communications go on there ... what other mysteries they hold ... what other hostages have lives hanging in the balance there in private communiqués that mean nothing except to the one who reads the ad knowing already what the writer of the ad is trying to say.

And finally, there is one for me ... and I realize I knew it would come some day. I didn't realize I'd be this scared.

This is why I took the night pill. It will let me drift away and my mind will travel along for a while, like it's gently going along with waves in the lake, heading nowhere, taking the scenic route.

I am dozing lightly when the phone rings. It sits on the table by me and when I pick it up, I recognize my attorney's voice. I wonder if he hears me slurring my words.

In the morning when I open the paper, I look first in the personals. It is there again. One for me.

This time, I know I'm not imagining it. And I circle it in black felt pen. It is to 'the lady of the lake' and it says only this: 'you should see the sunsets here.'

It's the same thing it said yesterday.

And I take this as a warning. My life has gone to hell and now they want me back in hell. It makes sense.

A buzzer goes off somewhere. To remind me to take my walk. I do tend to forget things. I have to set up reminders before I take the morning pill. I'll worry about this other stuff later but now I have a regimen to keep up.

The psychiatrist has started using the word 'regimen' for about a month. I think she has talked with Jeannette, who has no doubt told her of how I used to be. All those attentions to doing the things I did with verve and duty.

So this walk is now officially in my regimen. I am still the good girl sometimes, still doing what I feel is the right thing to do. Cooperate with the psychiatrist and maybe they will leave me in peace. The difference is that I know it's an act and I would resent that they have sucked me into playing their dishonest game if I could muster the energy.

By the time I get back to the cabin, I am sweating because I, of course, felt invigorated by seeing the water in the lake, imagining how it will be to take that first swim there this season, despite how brisk the water will feel, how I have another season of feeling along the muddy bottom for my mother's long-lost ring, looking forward to it all as a return to familiar minor insanities that is easier than the current problems ... and so my pace was perhaps more sprightly than it should have been.

Inside the kitchen, I go first for the fridge and the cool bottled water inside. I stand at the window and stare at the lake as I sip it down. And then reach for a bottle on the ledge, to take another pill with the cool water. Something is bothering me ...

Turning, I know something is wrong.

Something has happened in my absence.

But I don't know what.

Not at first.

My heart seems to creep from first to second gear. I look around, focusing, telling myself I am seriously going to drive myself insane if I don't stop and ...

And ...

And ... this is when I know what's different ... and wrong.

On the table, where I left the newspaper ... where the Metro page was on top, now the page with the circled personal ad is face up.

And right on top, right next to the black felt circle I put there ... is a thumb-sized piece of smoky brown quartz that I'd know even if I didn't dream about it sometimes.

I crash from the room, stumbling clumsily toward the door.

He is sitting on my couch. I would have to pass him to get to the front door and so I freeze in mid-step.

When he says my name, I think I'm turning to run the other way but everything spins for a moment before going black and cold.

Some nights when I am sleeping, I can wake inside a dream and not know it. It is the pills I take at night. They sometimes seem to lower me down a well until I am so frightened to wake up but more scared to not know if I am awake or asleep.

Something cool and wet is on my forehead. 

I think I'm not sleeping. 

Someone else is breathing in this room.

"Am I awake?" I say.

"Open your eyes, Gracie," he says to me. I can feel his warm hand on my hip. And then I feel his breath flowing over my cheek as he bends to speak into my ear. "Go back to sleep. I'll be here when you wake up."

When my eyes snap open, it is evening. I listen and hear nothing. I must have been awake inside a dream again. I've dreamed about the quartz before.

I sit up and take stock. I need a pill. I am off my sleep regimen. Or am I? It's confusing sometimes when she starts me on a new pill or when I mess with them, taking them out of order when I feel I have special needs. I pad into the kitchen and drink water from the bottle I find in the fridge. Where are my pills? They were on the ledge ... have I not gotten them out of their bags yet?

"I thought you'd be happy to see me," he says from behind me.

Turning in the direction of his voice, I bump into the table and crash into a chair.

"Sit down, Grace. Sit down."

"What are you doing here? I haven't crossed you ... I was awake ..."

"Sit down before you fall down."

I find myself complying, falling heavily into the kitchen chair that is at my side. He walks toward me, slams three prescription bottles down atop the table in front of me.

"What are these?"

"They help me ..." I reach for them but he holds on. I hear the panicky flutter in my voice to have someone this dangerous holding my pills in his big hands. "Let me have them, Ben."

"You feel helped, Grace?"

"I don't feel. That's the point." My finger lingers on the night pill bottle.

He chuckles. "Still got that haughty part of you I fell for. Even with this crap messing you up so bad you can barely stand up."

"I need those!" I scream at him when he walks to the sink and begins opening the first plastic bottle and upends the pills, turning on the water. I fly at him and scratch his arm, trying to get the others away as he opens each one. He elbows me away.

I feel despair bloom inside me as I watch them go, swirling down. I cry when he looks at me, the look in his face one of total disgust that they mean so much to me.

"Now what are you gonna do, Grace?"

"You bastard," I whisper, shocked by what he's done. He responds by thrusting his chin out at me.

I slap him. He takes it. I punch his chest. He dodges it. I come at him now, my hands in fists, trying to hurt him. He grabs my wrists and I try to kick him.

But it's hard to hold onto anything this solidly sharp in my emotions. It zaps my energy. A moment later, my arms hang limply in his hold.

"Those are bad for you, Grace. You don't need them ... What's wrong?"

"You tried to kill me. You shot at me," I mumble, trying to remember this.

"Gracie," he says, now putting his hands on my face and bending over to look in my eyes. "You know that's not true."

"They said ..."

"Who do you trust? Me or them?"

"Nobody."

"I'm okay with that."

"Why are you here?"

"One good turn deserves another, Gracie."

"I'm having some bad times right now."

"I can see that."

He finds all the pills I have while I sleep later. He rounds them up and then shows them to me when I wake up, makes me watch him wash them away.

I hate him. I scream at him and he holds me when I am sick.

He says I am too skinny; that he doesn't like skinny women. I tell him that's good because I don't like killers. He makes me eat scrambled eggs and meat and anything else he thinks will disgust me. He makes me eat apples and will not let me drink bourbon even as he sips it in front of me as I glare at him from the couch.

And then one morning, I wake up and it's not as hard as it was the day before. He says it's been four days and I say today I have to go to my appointment with the psychiatrist. He waits until after I have eaten the breakfast he cooks me. And then he says I need to call and say I am sick with some kind of woman's trouble. What kind of woman's trouble, I ask sarcastically. He blushes and says, you know, whatever it is that keeps you ladies in bed each month. I laugh at him and it is the first time I have used the muscles that make me laugh in a very long time.

And then I just look at him. His eyes drop.

"Why are you here?" I ask him. "Why am I still not trying to run away from you?"

"Call and cancel your appointment, Gracie. If you go, she will know you're not on the pills anymore."

"I need the pills."

"Not anymore."

"Are you here to kill me?"

He rolls his eyes. "Yeah, Gracie. That makes sense. I get you clean and then kill you."

"If Jeannette sees you when she comes to pick me up, she will ..."

His hand covers mine. His eyes examine me. I remember that he told me he was winning his freedom that night and I finally figure out that he meant that if the Sheriff was dead, then he was no longer under his control. And I realize something else ... it's good that my brain fog is gone, even if now I have to feel how much it hurts to be near him. And even if I feel shame to find the same hunger for him is lurking inside me, despite all that I now realize was perverted about what happened between us in the desert.

I call and cancel my appointment then call Jeannette to say I have a stomach virus. She offers to come and bring me something. I say that the doctor has called me in something and they will deliver it to me.

From the cabin I am renting, there is an overgrown path that winds down to the lake. There is a pier there but it is obvious no one's used it in a while before I came here a few months ago. We sit in the sun there, letting it make us begin to sweat.

He hasn't even needed for me to tell him about what's happened for I can tell he's guessed the gist of it in his usual way of reading people and situations. He is stretched out on a bench while I sit with my feet dangling over the water.

From the silence between us, he says he knew I'd feel obligated to own up to the password business. I say that was the least of my problems though it was a problem.

I hear him groan softly and I look over my shoulder to see him climbing up off the bench. He comes to sit by me. We do not look at each other after he settles in.

"I saw the newspapers you kept. Read up on what they're saying about you, Grace. Why didn't you just lie about what happened out there that night? They would have believed you."

I laugh and it is bitter to my ears. "Because I'm a good girl. Right?"

"What did it gain you in the end?"

"I didn't do it to gain anything." I look off into the sun that has risen high and is growing hotter without a breeze to interfere. "I deserved to be punished."

"Still such a good girl, Gracie." And later he asks, "What have you said about me?"

"Nothing," I say, my head dropping, my eyes closing.

"Why not?"

"Because ... I don't know."

"If you'd given them anything ... anything on me ... didn't you know they would have gone easy on you?"

My eyes find his. "Yes. I did. But I told you, remember? I wanted you to get away. I wanted you to never be caught."

"Oh, Gracie. You are such a loyal woman. I never deserved that."

"No one deserves anything but they still get it. I don't believe in fate or justice anymore because even that's in the hands of cowards and bullies."

He puts a hand on my cheek but I shake it off.

"You always tell me you didn't deserve it when I had faith in you or when I did something that was right by you. And you know what I think, Ben? I think you do think you are worth it ... you just hate feeling beholden to anyone."

He shakes his head but his eyes are lying because he knows I'm right. And I watch him as he decides to change the subject, to take control of this moment, to get it on the track he wants it to be on. And I think to myself, aha, now we find out why he's here and it won't be about me ... because I'm just a means to an end for him and I know this now.

"I've thought about you all this time, Grace. Wondered how you were. I just never thought ..."

"You thought about me? Oh, charming. Thanks. Did me so much good. Hey, Grace, I fuck up your life but cheerio, old girl ... Yeah. Thanks, Ben, ever so much. You're such a stand up criminal."

"I never thought you wouldn't get your old life back. I never meant for this to happen. I am sorry about ..."

"Why are you here? What else is there that you want to mess over for me, Ben? Is there some final indignity you dreamed up and wanted to get off on doing to me?"

He purses his lips and stares off into the water in the distance. 

The sun feels good. I look up at the cabin and think about the sanctuary it's been for me while I flirted with death and couldn't even get up the emotional charge to do something about it. And then I look at him, at how he is now staring down, away from me. And a memory comes back, unbidden, of a moment between us when I felt something for him.

"It isn't your fault," I say eventually, my voice hushed. "I know that. But it's easier to believe sometimes that it wasn't me doing that. Wasn't me making those decisions."

"You should have lied, Gracie. They would have believed you."

"Yes. I know that. I knew it then, Ben. Guess I just refused to let them deal better with half lies and cover ups. But everyone's playing an angle, right? It's like the extradition ... the only reason they are pushing for it is because blaming me and you is easier than finding out who else out there is dirty in this whole thing."

"I know you were listening at the door that last day when I was giving out orders to the men ... I know you heard where our rendezvous was in Mexico. Just like I know you could have found the way back to that last ranch ... and I figure you even knew who the owner was. I gave you all that, Grace, for you to use to help yourself out. We would have been gone by the time they got there ... and the ranch owner has the money to get out of any trouble."

"When it came right down to it, how could I do that, really? I promised you that I wouldn't change ... that I would never want to help them catch you."

"That was stupid, Grace. You should have told them where you knew I went. You should have told them all the things you learned about us that would have helped them track us down."

"That was wrong of me. But not for why you think. I didn't do it to be noble ... I did it because I was ... because ..."

"Because why? Gracie ... I want to explain about that night ... I had to do it ... You'll think I'm lying to you when I say the main reason was to save your life ... but it was. It was. And it was selfish, too, because I saw the way to set it up so he wouldn't kill you ... but he wouldn't live either. It helped me, sure it did, because I got rid of someone who would never have let me go. And I wanted to go, Grace."

"Go where?"

"I didn't know then. I do now."

"Two birds, eh?"

"I never counted on you having that knife. I never even once considered the possibility you might be a part of his dying."

He reaches out, tugs on my chin, makes me look in his eyes that fool me into thinking he's telling me the truth ... that he's really seen something inside me that he's read correctly.

"That's what really messed you up, Grace. And you know that."

"No. You guessed wrong, Ben."

I rise from where I am sitting. There are stairs at the end of the pier that step down into the water. There was probably once a boat tied here or maybe this is where people would swim if they didn't want to jump from the end of the dock. I am finally hot enough to want to swim even if the water shocks me as I sink into it.

"Remember the hot spring?" I ask him as I wade in.

"You really liked that," he says, studying me, trying to figure out what it is he can use as his new way inside me.

"You figured I was going to die the next day ... isn't that why you were acting so odd?"

"I wanted to see if you trusted me with your life but I also knew it wasn't in my hands anymore really ... so, yes, I knew they wanted you dead then. I didn't like that feeling ... that I was about to go back on my word to you because someone else was pulling my strings."

"Whoa! You just told me the truth, Ben!" I say, looking at him now, my eyes narrowed. "Is that you dropping your guard? And I didn't even have to have sex with you this time. Gee, will miracles never cease?"

He is on his feet now, shucking off his t-shirt ... and diving off the end of the dock with nothing on but his shorts.

And I am swimming out toward the middle of the lake and this is the first time I remember getting in and not feeling along the muddy bottom first to find my mother's ring.

He cuts me off before I get too far, swimming in front of me, making me stop and tread water as I watch him begin to circle in toward me. When he is close enough to touch me, he swims straight for me. Gathers me into his arms and I put my legs around his waist, drape my arms around his neck loosely.

"Gracie, my good girl ... what's gone so wrong for you that you've become such a cynic? Where's your ability to hold out hope for us all?" he asks softly.

His strength feels like the answer to everything just then.

My mouth is at his ear. No one else could hear me tell him about my legal troubles, about the extradition that won't go away, about the psychiatrist who cannot get me to really talk to her, about how it's never been about justice but about who scores points in this sham of an investigation ... and, finally, about how confused I remain over what happened, how I need him to help me understand because no one else is trying who doesn't have an agenda.

He swims with me the whole time I am telling him all this. When I am finished, I tuck my chin over his shoulder and let him move us inexorably toward the dock's steps. As he prods me up them, he leans in and says softly, "I have a confession of my own ... I have missed you so much it makes me ache to be this close to you."

I let him wrap his arms around me as I close my eyes. "No lies, Ben. And no mind games. Please ... Not when I'm so open to you and you could use all this against me."

"Something happened out there. We both feel it even now. I have spent quite a while trying to figure out why I'd hold out hope when there's no way we could be together. I never knew a woman before who made me want to change my life so there'd be a place in it for her."

"Why not? Why ..."

"I met a man once ... he brought me to justice ... I never thought I'd find what I envied in his life, a woman to stand by him through everything ... someone who loved him for what he was, not for what he wasn't. You and me, Grace, we got inside each other ... I want you to look at me like you used to. Like when we were out there ... and I felt you tremble and you trusted in me when I took you ... and you had hope for me ..."

"Don't touch me like that ..." I whisper but my eyes are closed and I am touching him, my hands on the small of his back, gripping in.

"I can't wait any longer, Grace ... been patient long enough with you ..."

And much later, he lies exhausted beneath me on the bed and my mouth is against the bottom of his sweating throat. "You are like a drug to me. You drop your guard with me ... and I am intoxicated again."

He chuckles, tired and sated, yet feeling all the power of his masculinity. "It'll be at least a few more hours before I can give you another hit, Grace."

"I can't get over you," I say and my voice is so sad to my ears.

"I got an idea what that feels like, Gracie."

That night, we sit on the covered porch and listen to the nightly serenade of mosquitoes, tree frogs, bull frogs and owls. We are sitting on the porch swing but not touching. I think about that last night with him, in the desert, when he sat on the swing but I didn't.

"Can I tell you a secret?" I say to him. "It has to do with all of this ... and I only give it up to you so you understand ... this all has everything and nothing to do with you. I just want you to be able to leave here and not come back."

He shifts next to me. I picture his face concentrating on me, willing me to make this matter. "Maybe so."

"When I was a teenager, I came home from school one day. My mother was waiting by the door with her suitcase. She was leaving us. She walked out and I begged her to let me come with her. She said she couldn't take me with her where she was going ... kind of like you did that night in the desert."

"Your mother abandoned you?" he asks, his voice soft, and I wonder why I'm telling him really. No one knows this anymore but my sister who hates me and this is part of the reason why.

I turn in the swing, look at him, take his hand. "My father and my sister used to ask me, over and over, what she said when she left. And I said she said nothing. My father went to his grave hating her for leaving and always wanting to believe she had no reason to go. I think he grew to hate me, too."

"Why did you lie to them all those years?"

I chuckle. "See? You knew I'd been lying ... you knew ... and that's so weird to me because it's the one secret in my life I've never revealed to anyone. I've never told anyone this ... but, yes, you're right ... she did tell me why she was leaving."

"And all this time, you never told anyone? Why not?"

"Because she asked me to keep it a secret."

"And you did? All this time?"

Nodding to him, I smile but it is a sad smile. "See? So that's the thing about me. I can seem like I'm doing the right thing ... but I can also lie to do it. And I guess in the end, that begs the question ... am I good or bad? Do I get my loyalties mixed up?"

He puts his arm around me, drawing me in against him, making me have contact with him as he considers this. And then, he says, because he has figured out what it took me months to admit to myself after I got home, "And then I left you there ... like she did ... and you've kept secrets about where I might have gone, what I said to you. Is that it?"

"I have them mixed up inside me, see? Because I loved her so much that I kept her secret. And I guess I thought I was in love with you ... and that if I kept your secrets ... that it was right. But all it's done is leave me feeling wasted inside. Again."

"And all this time, they've badgered you about me ... Gracie ... Let me help you."

"I didn't tell you that to feel sorry for me, Ben."

"Then why did you tell me?"

"Because you feel guilty, like you caused all this for me. But now, you see, don't you? This is me. And it's something I must find the way to put right."

"Except you haven't been treated fairly, Grace. They've abused you."

"I am far from virtuous. I was messed up, Ben, to feel any loyalty to you."

"They're gonna keep on messing with you, Grace, because it's what they do. And I don't like that." He puts a warm hand on my knee and squeezes. He leans in over me, his face suddenly tight, and he growls out, "Such a good girl ... you need a mean boy like me to watch out for you."

The smile I feel on my face surprises me. It is genuine. And it is amused. And it enjoys having him right here by me.

"Is that why you came here? To be my designated mean boy, Ben? Because you definitely fill the bill."

"I came for you, Grace. That's all I came for. I didn't expect to find you in this shape."

Everything shifts. The swing no longer swings. He moves closer. I sit still. He still scares me. I still wonder why I have opened up so much of myself to a man who readily admits he will use it all against me if he can.

"It's ironic, isn't it? That I'm telling you things that my psychiatrist would give her soul for me to admit."

"Then you don't need her, do you?"

I am looking in his eyes. He never blinks. There is such intensity there in his gaze. It was always unnerving to me when he'd focus on me so tightly, so confidently as if he believed in something so profound that he wanted me to see it inside him.

"What is it you want from me?" I ask him now, knowing that this moment may be when he really will tell me. Because it makes little sense to me that he'd risk his hard-won freedom to come here to visit a woman just to check on how she's faring. And for him to then stay around, increasing the danger for himself, when he finds she's going through hell. And for him to take on this temporary role of helping her find a breakthrough.

Not unless there really is something else going on, something he needs from me that he hasn't yet said.

He stands up slowly, taking his glass with him. He is drinking bourbon but still won't let me drink anything but water and soft drinks. He paces slowly in front of the screened back of the porch.

"Remember when I told you what I'd do, where I'd go, if I found myself in that future place where anything was possible to me?" he asks, looking down into his glass.

"Yes."

He looks at me over his shoulder. "I found it, Grace. You were right. It was there ... and it was possible if I just wanted to find a reason to change."

"The ranch? Your own ranch?"

"It's not much ... yet. I've just got the main house built ... and even that's not the way I want it to be in the end. But I took my share after we met up in Mexico ... And I told them all, they better go start their lives over, get out of this ... because with the Sheriff gone, we were all free to do what we wanted."

"I'm happy for you, Ben. I guess that's why they never found you."

"It was for you, Grace. You gave me a reason to change ... and I came back here to see you. To tell you. I figured if you were really the person I thought you were, then maybe I owed it you to say what you'd meant to me. That's why I came ... but now that I'm here, I realize that I can offer you something in return."

I gave him a reason to change ... I hear him say those words and they are echoes in my memory. A reason.

"Two birds, Gracie."

"Two birds? Not again!" I say, my laughter nervous, unanticipated.

He comes to me now, squatting down before me, his hands on either side of me, gripping the swing. His eyes are intense, his voice matches them. "Come back with me, Grace. Share this life with me. That's my two birds. I get the one woman I've ever met who I know would stand in there with me, and be there for good and bad ... I am not an easy man and I won't say I ever will be. But I will be good to you, Gracie, because a woman like you will make me want to be that man."

"Oh," I murmur, taken back by his proclamation ... and stunned that I believe every word against all odds. "That's only one bird," I say softly, searching for something to say.

"Sure. The second bird is this ... you get freedom. You leave all this behind. You disappear. They'll never find you. All of this bull is over. No more law problems, no more getting messed up. And I will never let them hurt you, Grace. I am mean enough to take them all on and I never lose at something like that."

"I can't do that ... even if you're serious."

"What's stopping you? You don't believe in any of this anymore. Tell me I'm lying."

I try to rise but he puts his hands on my thighs and keeps me there. "I can't put my life in your hands like that, Ben! Look at how we met ... it's crazy. Really, I don't know anything about you. About your past, your family, your childhood ..."

"What do you want to know that you don't already know? Because you do know me, Grace. And you still felt something pure enough to hold out hope for me." And then his eyes drop for just a flicker before looking into me again. "You should see the sunsets, Gracie. You will love them."

"I wouldn't know where to start explaining all the ways this is wrong to even think about. I don't think I could ... I just ... How can I ever consider this? With you?"

He cocks his head. "Do you need a sign, something big, that I have dropped my guard with you ... that I trust you with my life? Isn't that part of the change you'd need to throw your lot in with me? To see that I found a reason to re-make my life so you could want to have a place in it?"

"I don't know," I whisper and then I have this mad chain of thoughts that race around inside my body. I do know him ... both bad and good. Will he have changed in a way that makes it possible to even consider I could get past his past as a killer? Why does it feel that no longer matters so much to me? "I would need a promise ..."

He knows, instantly, that I didn't mean to open the door. So he barges through. "I am a rancher now, Grace. I'm still me ... but I have changed the way I earn my living. Is that what worries you?"

"Why would you want me with you?"

"Because I need you to be what you are with me. Because you were my reason to change the man I used to be, to start over new ... and I want to be that man with you, Grace."

I think about the way he's looked at me ... how I am crazy to consider this.

"What if I tell you the one secret about me that no one else living knows about?" he asks me, his voice soft, deceptive. "Only the Sheriff knew this ... and it's why I had to kill him or I'd never have been free."

I swallow. "So you'd tell me and then kill me, too?"

He chuckles. "No, Grace. You're a hard audience. No, I want to tell you because I want you to see how much I trust you ... to keep it safe for me."

"Is it about ..."

"It's about my past ... about where I'm really from."

"You're not from Arizona?"

"I'm from Arizona ... just not like you think."

"What does that mean?"

"Grace, will you come away with me?"

I look around the porch, gaze off over his head toward the lake. And I have to admit to myself ... that since the moment he asked, I feel alive. I feel me. I remember who I am.

And I think I'm insane ... but it's just a little insanity. And I've known I've had that, haven't I? Because all I can imagine is how this is the answer to everything.

This really could be the answer.

He could be my reason to change.

Not that I think I'm a bad person ... but I cannot say that my current state is what I want for my future. I thought I didn't know what I wanted. And maybe that's just the point. Maybe I want to not know. Maybe I want to not always do the right thing for the world out of sense of doing the moral thing ... but do the right thing for me out of a sense of what is ultimately neither easily right nor wrong.

This man ...

I put my hands on his cheeks and look into his eyes. There it is ... the part of him that I always believed showed an inner core I could relate to. I don't want him to leave me behind again. I want to go with him.

"What's your secret?"

"Promise me that you will keep looking in my eyes ... because I need you to know you can trust me when I tell you this. It's not anything you'd believe otherwise but ... you just need to hear me out. Okay?"

"I promise. I will listen and trust you. And I will never tell anyone else."

He takes a big breath, blows it out.

"When I said I was from Arizona but not like you'd think, this is what I meant," he says solemnly. "Remember that man I told you about? The one who brought me to justice? Well, that happened not in your lifetime, but over 100 years ago. See, I am not from this time, Grace. I was born in 1851  ..."