Free Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory Page A

proved the rule, the one that fell through the loop. Perhaps the loop was closing, and even now she had a choice: step through it and allow the loop to close behind her, or stay and be closed within it.
    What had she to lose? A few hours, perhaps nothing more than that.
    ‘Okay,’ she said quietly.
    ‘Sorry?’ he asked.
    ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay, let’s do that.’
    Later – that same evening in fact – when she had left him after the walking, the talking, the quieter moments when neither of them had anything much of anything to say, she would remember a small thing. Always the small things. It was the way he would pause every once in a while, and reaching with his right hand he would sort of massage the back of his neck, like there was a tension there, something psychosomatic, something neither physical nor muscular, but nevertheless as real as any ache someone might feel. He did it several times, even as they ate lunch together in a small bistro off Riverside Drive, and she’d wanted to ask him if he was in pain, if there was something she could do. But she did not. She did not reach too far, for to reach too far was to lose your equilibrium, andthe weight of a rejection could only serve to cause a fall. She did not wish to fall, not this time, not any time, and prevention was always better than cure. Her mother would say that. But then her mother would say a lot of things.
    She had wondered if she would always be the anachronism, the odd-one-out, the incongruous literary recluse who spent her life in a bookstore.
    Until that Saturday afternoon. And it was during that afternoon, as she walked and talked with the stranger that was David Quinn, as he smiled and made her laugh, as he showed her things in the neighborhood that she had never seen before, that she realized that perhaps there might be hope. Not necessarily with David, for David seemed
complete
, a word that came to mind without searching for any description. He seemed like a whole person, a person without attachments and appendages, without all the emotionally complex baggage that so many men seemed to carry as if it was their life’s purpose. Here, she believed, was a man who would take the 5:36 for Two Harbors, nestling there beneath the Sawtooth Mountains, where on a clear day you could almost reach out and touch the Apostle Islands and Thunder Bay, and if there were those that cared to walk with him he would let them. And those that were not … well, he would leave them standing on the platform and never give them another thought. They would wave perhaps, and then watch him roll away soundlessly into the indistinct distance of memory. He did indeed appear to travel alone, packing only sufficient for his needs, not burdening himself with things too weighty, like lost loves, forgotten dreams, jealousies, frustrations and hatred. He carried with him the finer things. Things to share. Things that weighed next to nothing but held the significance of everything. These were the things he carried, and in some small way they also carried him.
    She appreciated his independence, his sense of balance and closure, and when he spoke of himself he spoke humbly, as if there were no great matters to understand, no great depths tofathom. He was neither pretentious nor vain nor ostentatious. He seemed neither possessive nor jealous nor quick to rebuke. He listened well, and in speaking she found a silent mouth and a receptive ear. He was there – and that was enough.
    A little after four they had parted company, he heading north to the other side of the park, she heading south towards home. They had shaken hands, nothing more than that, and though in itself such an action seemed almost incongruous, it also seemed so right. They were not yet friends, merely acquaintances at best, and to read anything further into their meeting was to read into fiction.
    He said he might come by sometime, perhaps to get some more books, and she had nodded and smiled and said he was