Half Moon Hill Read Online Free Page B

why I didn’t recognize you. Unless you haven’t seen a mirror lately.
    It stung to hear her words again, even just in his mind. But he shook it off. Because he had to. Because wallowing in the situation wouldn’t change it. Women wouldn’t want him anymore—so be it. That was a tough pill to swallow, but . . . well, one more reason why the isolation of the woods suited him.
    Of course, even if she didn’t tell anybody, things would be different after this. He officially had a neighbor now. But don’t over worry it. Maybe it’ll be fine.
    No matter what he told himself, though, the encounter yesterday stayed on his mind, in more ways than one. It hadn’t exactly been pleasant, but it had definitely felt different—more personal—than the couple of times he’d ridden his motorcycle over to Crestview for a few groceries. And she was probably the nicest sight his eyes had seen in months, but hell—that brought his thoughts right back to what he could no longer have: gorgeous women like Anna Romo. Why couldn’t she have just stayed in her damn house, or at least in her damn yard, and let him be?
    Stop. Thinking. As he trudged back up the slight grade, bucket still in hand, he tried to clear his mind and get back to the solitude he’d found here. God knew that a ramshackle cabin in the woods wasn’t where he’d expected to be at this point in his life, but it was—oddly—where he felt best now. Not that best equaled great or even good—but it was the better end of misery, he supposed. For a man of thirty-six, he felt far too tired inside.
    He’d camped a lot as a kid, and now he realized that he’d likely come here—out into the near-wilderness—because it took him back there , to the time when he’d been eight, or maybe ten. Back to a time when life had seemed pretty damn simple compared to all the shit that had happened later. There was something honest and real in hauling your own water, eating simple foods, sinking into nature and letting it absorb you. It had made him realize that most of the things people worried about on a day-to-day basis were crap, not worth their time or attention, let alone their emotion. And the rest of the stuff people worried about—the stuff that did matter—well, that was mostly out of anyone’s control, and in the end, it just wore you down. All of which was why blending into the woods for a while had ended up being the easiest choice.
    Just then, Denny Bodkins’ face flashed in his mind. Damn. Stop. Don’t see it. He knew. He knew there was nothing you could do.
    And then he pulled his focus back in, close and tight, on the things he really could see right now. The thick foliage around him on the trail back to the cabin. His work boots as he put one foot in front of the other, step after step. The click of an insect somewhere nearby, and then the tweet of a bird. All simpler, better things to concentrate on.
    And it was because he was keeping his eyes close to the ground, on the path directly ahead of him, that he spotted Anna Romo’s basket in the distance, still lying where she’d dropped it in the clearing near the blackberries. It struck him funny that for all his focus on these woods, he hadn’t even realized until yesterday that there were blackberry bushes thirty yards from the cabin.
    Approaching, he saw that most looked good and ripe. Lowering his bucket to the ground, he stooped to set her wicker basket upright, then gathered the handful of scattered berries that had fallen from it.
    He wasn’t sure why. It wouldn’t hurt anything if he’d just left them lie.
    But maybe there was something just a little bit heartening in the notion that after all that had been ruined in his life lately—some parts by him, some by fate—there were still a few small things he had the power to clean up, a few things he could actually fix or repair. Even if it was just a basket of spilled blackberries—somehow the mere act of picking them up restored a tiny bit of