Free River’s End by Nora Roberts Page A

their palms met. When they were alone, Jamie sat quietly, watching.
    “Livvy, do you remember the forest? Grandma’s house up in the woods, all the big trees and the streams and the flowers?”
    “I went there when I was a baby, but I don’t remember. Mama said we’d go back sometime and she’d show me her best places.”
    “Would you like to go there, to Grandma’s house?”
    “To visit?”
    “To live. I bet you could have the same room your mother had when she was a little girl. It’s a big old house, right in the forest. Everywhere you look there are trees, and when the wind blows, they sigh and shiver and moan.”
    “Is it magic?”
    “Yes, a kind of magic. The sky’s very blue, and inside the forest, the light is green and the ground’s soft.”
    “Will Mama come?”
    Yes, Jamie thought, it was amazing how much pain the heart could take and go on beating. “Part of her never left, part of her’s always there. You’ll see the places we played when we were girls. Grandma and Grandpop will take very good care of you.”
    “Is it far, far away?”
    “Not so very far. I’ll come visit you.” She drew Olivia onto her lap. “As often as I can. We’ll walk in the woods and wade in the streams until Grandma calls us home for cookies and hot chocolate.”
    Olivia turned her face into Jamie’s shoulder. “Will the monster find me there?”
    “No.” Jamie’s arms tightened. “You’ll always be safe there. I promise.”
    But not all promises can be kept.

Five
    Olympic Rain Forest, 1987
    In the summer of Olivia’s twelfth year, she was a tall, gangly girl with a wild mane of hair the color of bottled honey. Eyes nearly the same shade were long lidded under dark, slashing brows. She’d given up her dreams of being a princess in a castle for other ambitions. They’d run from explorer to veterinarian to forest ranger, which was her current goal.
    The forest, with its green shadows and damp smells, was her world, one she rarely left. She was most often alone there, but never lonely. Her grandfather taught her how to track, how to stalk a deer and elk with a camera. How to sit quietly as minutes became hours to watch the majestic journey of a buck or the grace of a doe and fawn.
    She’d learned to identify the trees, the flowers, the moss and the mushrooms, though she’d never developed a proficient hand at drawing them as her grandmother had hoped.
    She spent quiet days fishing with her grandmother, and there had learned patience. She’d taken on a share of the chores of the lodge and campground the MacBrides had run in Olympic for two generations, and there had learned responsibility. She was allowed to roam the woods, to wade in the streams, to climb the hills. But never, never to go beyond their borders alone.
    And from this, she learned freedom had limits.
    She’d left Los Angeles eight years before and had never been back. Her memories of the house in Beverly Hills were vague flickers of high ceilings and shining wood, pretty colors and a pool with bright blue water surrounded by flowers. During the first months she’d lived in the big house in the forest, she’d asked when they would go back to where she lived or when her mother would come for her, where her father was. But whenever she asked questions, her grandmother’s mouth would clamp tight and her eyes would go shiny and dark.
    From that, Olivia learned to wait.
    Then she learned to forget.
    She grew tall, and she grew tough. The fragile little girl who hid in closets became little more than a memory, and one that ghosted into dreams. Living in the present was another lesson she learned, and learned well.
    With her chores at the campground over for the day, Olivia wandered down the path toward home. The afternoon was hers now, as much a reward as the salary her grandmother banked for her twice monthly in town. She thought about fishing, or hiking up to high ground to dream over the lake, but felt too restless for such sedentary