Black Out by Lisa Unger

“Maybe that’s what has you so spooked, Annie. Maybe that’s what’s different about this time.” He extends his hand to me, and I join him by the doors. He points out the window.
    “Look how much light there is out there. Look at that couple walking on the beach.”
    There’s a young girl in a sweater and jeans, holding the hand of a tall, thin young man. They walk slowly, arms swinging.
    “With so much light, you would have been able to see
something
about him.”
    “There
was
someone there,” I say quickly. “Esperanza saw him. The police saw his footprints.”
    “I don’t doubt there was someone. But it wasn’t Marlowe Geary.” He turns to me, touches my face. “Isn’t it possible that you saw someone, became frightened, and your mind did the rest?”
    I don’t answer immediately. Then, “He called me Ophelia.”
    He walks away from me, lies down on the bed with a sharp exhale of breath. I stay by the door watching him.
    Gray is not a handsome man, not in the classical sense. Though there’s something in the way he carries himself that makes a girl forget he’s not easy on the eyes. He is older than I am by twelve years. There’s a hard silence to him, a shell you’re not sure you want to crack. There was no reason for me to fall in love with him. In fact, the circumstances of our meeting were not conducive to the start of a relationship. The first time I met Gray, he handcuffed me and threw me in the back of his car. He wasn’t sure what to do with me, and he couldn’t leave me as he found me, or so he would tell me later. I was a mess of a girl, nearly starved and half crazy with fear and grief. Anyone else in his position might have just left me to fend for myself. He could have turned me over to the police or dropped me at a hospital. But he didn’t.
    “I loved you before I even knew I loved you,” he told me once.
    “Then why the handcuffs?”
    “I loved you, but I didn’t trust you. You can’t trust a beaten dog. Not until
it
learns to trust you.”
    “That’s not a very flattering analogy.” Though I suppose that’s what I was then, a dog so badly beaten that I wouldn’t have known the difference between a hand poised to strike and one poised to caress.
    He touched me in that way he had, to soften his words, a gentle stroke on the back of my head that ends in him tracing my jaw and then resting his hand on my cheek. “Sorry.”
    There was no reason for us ever to be together and every reason for us never to see each other again after he got me the help I needed and then made Ophelia disappear completely. I fell in love with him because he was the only upright person I had ever known. He was the first safe place I found in my life. Because he came every day to be with me, even if I couldn’t talk or didn’t want to, even when I ranted and hated him and threw him out. He always came back.
     
    I try to remember that now as I watch his chest rise and fall. I sit back down in the chair. After a minute I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. Sometimes he is so exhausted after he’s been away that he falls asleep during arguments or while making love. I try not to take it personally.
    “Annie,” he says finally with a sigh. He sits up and comes over to me, kneels before me on the floor. He takes my hands in his and puts them to his mouth for a second. Then, “Whatever is going on, I swear to you, Marlowe Geary is dead.”
    Over the last few hours, sitting in my vigil, I had convinced myself that Marlowe didn’t die that night, that Gray has lied to me all these years. I thought of at least five ways he might have survived. My twisted imagination spun a web around me, and I was sure of all of this, positive. But now, with Gray to ground me, I’m more inclined to believe that my mind is playing tricks on me—again. Maybe Drew’s right; someone knows my secrets and is trying to get to me. Or maybe, as Gray seems to think, it was just a stranger on the beach and my mind did the