Only with TJ inside her, the two of them desperately searching for the past in each other's eyes, could she find the happiness she had once felt. Only by making love to him did her thoughts clear enough for her to recognize that there was a path back to that happiness for them, but it lay forward.
"Ella … " He reached up to caress her breasts, to run his thumbs over her nipples and pinch them gently, making her shiver.
His hips rose to meet her, his urgency growing even as she felt the crest rising within her, carrying her toward bliss. She studied his eyes and wished that he would always look at her that way.
"This is how it should be," she said breathlessly. "You listening, honey? This, right here … we've got to find a way to … to bottle it. Hold on to it."
She glimpsed a fleeting sadness in him and then, face flushed, TJ smiled.
"We could just never stop," he suggested, thrusting suddenly upward.
Ella shivered with pleasure and bent lower over him, her hair brushing his face, suddenly weak with need and pleasure. Her legs began to shake as her orgasm approached and she gripped his shoulders fiercely, both wanting to reach her climax and wanting to hold back and savor this crest.
"Good idea," she managed. "Just do this … forever."
Forever. No more fighting. No more tension. Just this feeling of unity.
TJ went rigid, trapping her on top of him. They came together, which hadn't happened in a very long time. Panting, smiling, nuzzling into each other, they sank down on the bed and tangled themselves up, limbs purposefully wound together. Aftershocks of pleasure rolled through Ella and she grabbed the back of TJ's head and kissed him deeply, then laid her head on his chest and ran her fingers through the blond curls there.
"You're right, you know," TJ said quietly. "We've got to hold on to this."
For long, wary seconds, she did not reply. Then at last she managed to speak.
"How do we do that? We haven't had much luck so far."
"We start like this," he said. "Just talking about it. We owe it to Grace."
"We owe it to each other, too. I do love you, you know?"
TJ shifted onto his side in bed, extricating himself from her so that they were face-to-face on the same pillow. Ella ran her hand over the scruff along his jaw that he never quite allowed to turn into a beard. She searched his gaze, heart pounding, wondering whether it was too late for them. If their relationship fell apart it would be due to neglect, and they would both be to blame.
"I love you, too," TJ assured her. "But where do we go from here? We keep blaming each other-"
"For everything," she agreed.
The economy had begun to recover a little, but not quickly or vigorously enough to save them financially. Not yet, anyway. Ella had done everything she could to keep The Vault from going under, changing the menu and the marketing, but the restaurant was still barely paying for itself. She hadn't drawn a salary in years. They'd been living off whatever TJ could earn as an electrician and musician. If he hadn't inherited their little house from his mother, there would have been no way for them to afford rent or a mortgage. It did feel as if their prospects were brightening, but she didn't know if it would happen quickly enough to keep them above water.
"We can't gamble on this," Ella said. "All the bullshit and blame-they're habits now. Maybe we need someone … a referee."
"A therapist?" TJ asked. "You'd do that?"
"Would you?"
Ella said a silent prayer of thanks and hope. She didn't know if they could make this moment of calm understanding last, but she certainly intended to try.
"I think we should-" she began.
Down the hall, Grace began to scream.
Jerking away from TJ, Ella scrambled from the bed. Her legs tangled in the sheets and she fell to the floor, whacking her elbow on the hardwood. She cried out as she tore free, looked up and saw TJ pulling on a pair of sweatpants he'd discarded by the bed. He called out their daughter's name and Ella echoed him.
"A nightmare?" TJ asked.
Ella tore the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around herself, rushing out of their bedroom behind him.
"I don't think so," she said.
A mother knows her baby's cries, even when the baby in question isn't really a baby anymore. This fearful, panicked scream had been born from more than any bad dream. They ran down the short upstairs hall, past the bathroom, and charged through Grace's open bedroom door, TJ in the lead.
Ella ran in behind him and went straight to their daughter. Grace knelt on her bed, pressed into the corner between the headboard and the wall with a pillow clutched against her like a shield. Her eyes were wide with terror. She spared them only a single glance, her focus locked on an empty spot at the foot of the bed.
"What is it, Gracie?" TJ asked, turning right and left, searching for some threat to his girl.
When Ella took Grace in her arms the girl stopped screaming, but still could not help staring at that spot at the end of her bed.
"What happened?" Ella said quietly. "What frightened you, kiddo?"
Grace blinked, shook her head as if waking, and turned to stare at her mother.
"An old lady," the little girl said. "Right in my room, down at the end of the bed. A ghost lady."
Frigid fingers danced along Ella's spine and she shivered, glancing at TJ. There were only the three of them in the room, that much could not be argued. But instead of turning to look back at Ella and Grace, TJ could not tear his gaze from the window on the far wall from Grace's bed, which stood open a couple of narrow inches.
"Did you leave that open?" Ella asked.
Snow had swirled in and built a thin, ridged layer of white on the sill. It had begun to turn to sleet, a thousand icy little pinpricks on the window glass.
"No," TJ said, turning to her. "I don't think so."
Ella didn't think she had, either.
"Ssshhh," she whispered to Grace, holding her daughter tightly. "It's okay. It was just a bad dream. You're okay now."
One of us must have opened it and not remembered, she thought.
She held the girl close but her eyes were on TJ. He stood frowning at the open window for several seconds longer and then at last he walked over, swept the snow from the sill to the floor, and shut it tightly.
The wind and the sleet continued.
One of us must have.
EIGHT
Detective Keenan rolled through the red light at Winter and Main without bothering to turn on the siren. It was after one A.M. and the roads were abandoned except for the plows, whose drivers were trying to scrape the sleet and snow from the street. The coming day promised to be even colder, and if the slush froze solid before they could get it off the pavement, the streets would be even more treacherous.
The engine purred as he guided his unmarked to the next intersection, then turned left along the river. The blue lights built into the grille of the vehicle threw gliding blue phantoms onto the snowbanks around the car. The tires splattered the slush to either side as he drove but he kept his hands tight on the wheel, ready to act if he hit an ice patch.
Another winter, another friggin' snowstorm, he thought.
But this wasn't just another storm. The sleet had made sure of that. He remembered worse, of course-both snowstorms and ice storms-but this one had turned out to be pretty bad, and very weird. The department had received more than a dozen calls from folks who claimed to have seen ghosts. Detective Keenan figured they were either cranks or nutjobs and had said as much when the dispatcher had called him several hours before to see if he would drive up nearly to the state line to talk to a woman who had asked for him by name but not given her own. Keenan had declined; he'd been off duty, and there was no reason the woman couldn't give her statement to a uniformed officer and wait until tomorrow for a detective to investigate her ghost story.
Insane, he thought now, driving along Riverside Road, the water churning by on his right. A little snow and people go batshit crazy.
"You're one of them," he said aloud, his voice filling the quiet of the car.
It was true enough. During most snowstorms in the past dozen years, people in Coventry had gotten … twitchy. There were always frantic calls about missing kids who turned out to have gone sledding or-with the older ones-were out drinking with friends. Joe Keenan had been through enough of these that he'd become almost numb to the skittishness that came over so many Coventry folks in the wintertime.
Tonight felt different.
Ghost stories were different. As unsettled as the town always grew during a storm, this was a new development. A dozen calls, each with a story. He could still recall with anxious clarity the sound it had made that night twelve years ago when he had hit something in the blizzard with his car. The dent had been there for months before the police department's mechanics had gotten it fixed. And he remembered the deaths of Charlie Newell and Gavin Wexler, and the way the Wexler kid's father had been there one second and gone the next. Lost in the storm.
Detective Keenan thought the people who had been unnerved by snowstorms for the past dozen years needed to move on, but tonight people-too many people-were talking about ghosts, and it freaked him out a little.
Stupid, he thought.
Maybe it was, but he kept his hands tight on the wheel and surveyed the road ahead with great care.