He slid into the booth opposite her with the careful, brittle movements of someone afraid they might shatter. The vinyl seat creaked under his weight. Up close, he was even more weathered. The lines on his face were canyons carved by years she hadn't witnessed. His hands, resting on the Formica table, were calloused and marked with small, faded scars. These were the hands of a man who had worked, who had struggled in the real world. They were nothing like the perfect, storybook hands of the house's imitation.
He didn't try to touch her. He didn't even seem to know what to do with his own hands, finally clasping them together as if in silent prayer. His eyes, a faded version of the hazel she saw in the mirror, never left her face, drinking her in with a kind of desperate, reverent hunger.
The waitress came over, her cheerfulness a stark contrast to the tension at the table. "Can I get you something, hon?"
John flinched, startled by the interruption. "Oh. Uh. Coffee. Just coffee, thank you."
Silence descended again after she left. It was a thick, heavy thing, full of twenty years of absence. Lane waited. She was the curator of this meeting. She would set the terms.
"It's really you," he finally whispered, his voice cracking on the last word.
"It's me," Lane confirmed, her tone neutral, observational.
The waitress returned with a mug and a pot of coffee. The mundane ritual of pouring—the steam, the rich smell—provided a momentary anchor. He wrapped his hands around the mug, seeking its warmth.
"I don't know where to start," he said, staring into the dark liquid.
"Start with after," Lane said. "After you left. Not the why. The what. What did you do?"
It was a clinical question. A request for data. It seemed to throw him. He had likely prepared for tears, for accusations, for a dramatic scene. He hadn't prepared for an interview.
He took a shaky breath. "I drove. For days. I ended up in the southwest. Arizona, New Mexico. I took odd jobs. Construction, mostly. Dishwashing. I used a different name. John Miller." He gave a short, bitter laugh. "Not very creative. I just… existed. I stayed away from people. I thought… I thought if I kept moving, kept my head down, the… the darkness… wouldn't catch up to me. Or if it did, it would only catch me."
"The darkness?" Lane prompted, her voice quiet.
He looked up, his eyes haunted. "It's hard to describe. It was a feeling. A pressure. Like something was always watching me from just out of sight. A feeling that I was… wrong. That I brought a curse with me. My father had it. His sister had it. I thought it was madness. I thought I was sparing you." He shook his head. "But it wasn't madness, was it? It was that house."
Lane's expression didn't change. "We're not talking about the house."
He flinched again, nodding quickly. "Right. Sorry." He took a gulp of coffee, wincing as it burned his tongue. The pain seemed to ground him. "I lived like that for years. Just getting by. Then, about… ten years ago, I guess, I got a job as a caretaker for a small, remote cemetery in the desert. It was quiet. Isolated. It felt… appropriate. I've been there ever since. Living in a little shack on the property. Talking to the dead. It was easier than talking to the living."
Lane processed this. A cemetery caretaker. It was a fitting, poetic end for the ghost he had tried to become. Hiding among the dead to escape the living death of the Maddox curse.
"Your mother?" he asked, the question tentative, fearful.
"She moved on," Lane said, and it was the truth. Her mother had remarried, moved to another state, built a new, quieter life. She had rarely spoken of John. The wound had scarred over. "She's happy."
A complex mix of relief and profound sadness crossed his face. "Good. That's… that's good." He hesitated. "And you?"
Lane looked out the window at the quiet street. "I survived."
The simplicity of the statement seemed to hold more weight for him than any dramatic tale. His shoulders slumped slightly. "I read about you. Sometimes. In newspapers I'd find. Your graduation. I saw a picture. You looked…" He trailed off, unable to find the word.
"Like my mother," Lane finished for him.
"Yes," he whispered.
The hour was ticking away. Lane could feel the boundary she had set approaching. She had the data now. The outline of his story. It was a story of fear, of running, of a pathetic, self-imposed exile. There was no grand conspiracy, no noble sacrifice. Just a broken man making a catastrophic choice.
He seemed to sense the time was short. He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping, intense. "Lane, I know I don't have the right to ask for anything. I know I can never make it up to you. But what happened… in that field… it felt like a… a release. A pardon. I don't understand it, but I feel… clean. For the first time since I was a boy. I want… I would give anything for a chance to… to just… be near you. To know you. No expectations. Just… a chance."
He was begging. Not for forgiveness—he seemed to know that was beyond his reach—but for proximity. For a footnote in her story.
Lane looked at him. Really looked. She saw the ghost of the handsome man in the photograph, buried under years of guilt and sun and desert dust. She saw the source of the phantom that had tormented her. She saw a primary source, a living, breathing artifact of her own history.
She was not the little girl he had left behind. She was the Librarian. And a librarian's job was to preserve, to understand, not to punish.
She finished her coffee and placed the mug down with a soft click. The sound signaled the end of the hour.
"John," she said, using his name for the first time. It felt strange on her tongue. "I am going to travel. I am going to see national parks. I am going to breathe air that has no history. I need to do this alone."
The hope in his eyes died, replaced by a resigned acceptance. He nodded, looking down at his hands. "I understand."
"But," she continued, and his head snapped up. "When I am done. When I am ready. I will have questions. About my grandparents. About your childhood. About things that have nothing to do with why you left."
He stared at her, not daring to believe what he was hearing.
"If you want to be available to answer those questions," she said, her voice firm, "you can give me a way to contact you. That is the only offer on the table. There are no guarantees."
It was not an invitation back into her life. It was an offer of a future, strictly limited, professional consultation. It was more than he deserved, and they both knew it.
Tears welled in his eyes, but he blinked them back fiercely. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper and a stub of a pencil. His hands trembled as he wrote down a number. "It's the phone at the chapel office. The cemetery. It's always on. I'm always there."
He slid the paper across the table. It sat between them, a fragile bridge over an ocean of pain.
Lane picked it up. She didn't put it in her pocket immediately. She simply held it.
"Okay," she said.
She stood up. He rose too, a reflex of politeness.
"Goodbye, John," she said.
"Goodbye, Lane," he whispered.
She paid for the coffees at the counter, not looking back. She walked out of the diner and into the sunlight. She did not feel lighter. She did not feel heavier. She felt… integrated. She had acquired a new, difficult text for her collection. She would not read it today. But she knew where it was shelved.
She walked down the street toward the bus stop, the piece of paper with the phone number a small, specific weight in her hand. She had a world to see. And now, for the first time, she had a past she could reference, if she ever chose to. Not a ghost. Not a monster. Just a man in a booth, with a story of his own.
The bus arrived. She got on. This time, she knew exactly where she was going. The destination was on the first page of her new book. The sentence about the hiking boots was waiting to be written.