He’d wrap his arms around her as though he loved her and understood. “We’ll make our own,” he’d say. “Who wants to live in someone else’s dream?”
Liz would nod as if she agreed, though she didn’t. Her grandparents had built the two-story Craftsman bungalow in 1923. She’d spent every summer there. On the drive over from Portland, she’d watch the forest from her place in the backseat until they reached Bend, where the Deschutes sparkled like someone had sprinkled broken glass on a slate-gray table. The house was small, but every inch of it held some kind of memory. Even as a child, she’d felt it was her house. Her refuge. When her grandparents died, they left the house to her mother and father. After they passed in a car accident in Eastern Oregon, Liz and Owen bought out her brother, Jim. It took every penny they had and left them with a mortgage payment that stretched their already tight resources nearly to the snapping point. She’d thought Owen had fought to get the house for her. It was only after the deal was done that Liz understood how her husband of four years really felt about the house.
Owen saw a fortune instead of a quaint old house stuffed with memories. He was constantly reviewing the neighborhood homes on Zillow and Redfin. Over and over he’d tell her the house wasn’t worth a penny, but the land was suitable for a million-dollar-plus home. When one of the houses a few doors down passed the two-million-dollar mark on Zillow, he made love to her like they were celebrating a windfall of their own.
A few summers ago, they’d sat on their porch and watched as the house next door, nearly a twin of their own, was devoured by the jaws of a wrecker.
“That’ll be us one day,” he said.
Liz had sipped a beer as a paddleboarder’s wake lapped at the riverbank. She didn’t tell Owen that it was bone-crushingly sad to watch that house vanish. The old places built by previous generations were being eclipsed one after another by enormous megahomes that took up every square inch of their lots and blocked out the sun for those who hadn’t yet given in and erected their own behemoths. Joined the fight to see who could be bigger. Boxier. More obtrusive. More show-the-world-what-I-have. Liz finished her beer and tried to let go of the past as David and Carole Franklin removed the house next door like it was a pimple on a chin.
She’d wanted to hate them. But she couldn’t.
Sure, David and Carole were nice enough. New people almost always are—at first. David ran a restaurant downtown. Carole was a textile artist, but that was a recent affectation. Previously, she’d held a senior management position at Google. It was their little boy, Charlie, who provided the bridge between Liz and Carole. He was blond, had blue eyes, and seemed to delight in all the same things that Liz held dear. He loved the river. He collected dozens of pebbles from the riverbank. Charlie didn’t seem to see any difference between an agate and a chip of basalt.
“He’s into quantity,” Carole once told Liz as they watched the boy drop another bucket of his treasures on the sweeping redwood decking of the Franklins’ house.
“Owen’s into quantity too,” Liz said. “He likes money.”
Both women laughed.
Liz was a blur as she hurried across the gravel breezeway to the garage, dialing Owen’s number as she went. The call went to voice mail. She pushed the button to open the garage door, and as it slowly rose, she left a message.
“Owen! I’m late! You know how important this is to me. To us. I would never have let you down like this. How could you leave without making sure I had my ass in gear?”
She slid behind the wheel and turned over the engine of her RAV4. The radio went off like a bomb, blasting a pop song so loudly it made her want to scream as she scratched at the volume control. The music was nearly silenced, but Liz’s heart kept hammering so fast and so hard that she wished for a Xanax. Despite her cold shower, sweat collected on the nape of her neck. Scratch the Xanax. She knew that she was so hyped up on pills and so rattled from the sleepless night of studying that polluting her bloodstream with anything more couldn’t possibly help.
Goddamn it, Owen!
She put the car in reverse and pressed the ball of her foot against the accelerator. As the car rolled out of the garage, Liz felt a hard bump and slammed on the brakes.
The thump against the rear bumper had been muted but solid, decisive. Had to have been a dog or a cat. She’d even heard a kind of muffled cry when she applied the brakes. Oh, God, she hated the idea of hurting an animal. She’d never gotten over the time Owen ran over a fox terrier as they pulled off the freeway one late summer day a couple of years back.
At first he’d resisted Liz’s pleas to stop the car. When he reluctantly did, he’d stayed inside while Liz scooped up the animal and wrapped it in her jacket.
“Poor baby,” she murmured to the trembling creature when she returned to the open passenger door.
“Oh, hell no,” Owen said, glaring at the bundle in her arms. “I’m not taking that to the vet.”
“That, Owen, is someone’s precious pet,” she said, shifting her arms so he could see the wounded canine’s scared brown eyes. “You have to. Otherwise it will be a hit-and-run and you’ll face charges.” That was probably a stretch, but she knew her husband needed a possible consequence to motivate him to do the right thing. Owen Jarrett was, at best, a reluctant rule follower.
She got in the car and shut the door.
Owen glared at the dog in her lap. “I do not want to get stuck with the bill, Liz.”
“It’s always money with you,” she shot back.
“Cheap shot.”
The dog whimpered some more.
“You hit an animal,” Liz said. “You have to help it. What if it was our dog?”
Owen looked at her and blinked. “We don’t have one.”
“If we did.”
“Fine. Fine,” he said. “We can take the dog to the damn vet.” He put the car into gear and drove slower than he normally did. It was a disgusting thought, but Liz wondered if he was stalling in the hope that the dog would die before they got to the vet.
No such luck.
The terrier patched up and the owner contacted, Liz wondered how it was that Owen hadn’t understood—or cared—that the dog’s life had mattered to someone. An elderly lady. A little kid. He’d been worried about the cost of it all. Or maybe the inconvenience.
Doing the right thing wasn’t that hard to do.
Around that time, Liz started volunteering at the humane society in Bend. She’d always loved animals. Except horses, of course. Horses always frightened her. They reminded her of what she would come to consider the second-worst day of her life.
CHAPTER TWO