“I want to get this over with. I have to leave town tonight.”
“Forget it. You can talk to me when hell freezes over.” Ella groaned, leaned her head back on my shoulder, then shut her eyes. I dabbed her forehead. He waited patiently through all this, and I noticed he had the good grace to avoid looking at her. I could have done without his narrow-eyed scrutiny on me, however. “You know,” he said evenly, “it’s not that much fun tormenting somebody who’s already got so much trouble on her hands. Even if you do fight back pretty well.”
“What a compliment.”
“Look, let’s stop this. I’m not what you think I am. I’m not a friend, but I’m not an enemy, either.”
“Oh, really. How mysterious. Look—either tell me what you want or get out of here.”
Frowning, he pulled a dog-eared black-and-white photo from his shirt pocket and held it out. For the first time I noticed his right hand. I froze. Whoever he was, something godawful had happened to him.
His ring finger and little finger were gone, as well as a deep section at their base. His middle finger was scarred and knotty. Lines of pink scar tissue and deep, puckered gouges snaked up his right forearm. Grotesque and awkward, the hand looked like a deformed claw.
Suddenly I was aware of my own fingers, flexing them, grateful they were all in place. He wasn’t an invincible threat. He was very human, and more than a little damaged.
“Enjoying the view?” he asked tersely. I jerked my gaze to his face. Ruddy blotches of anger and embarrassment colored his cheeks. He quickly transferred the photo to his undamaged left hand and dropped the right hand into the shadows between his knees. “Have you ever seen a copy of this picture before?”
I took a deep breath and looked at the photo. A solemn, handsome young boy gazed back at me from my parents’ wedding picture. There was only one copy of the picture, I thought, and I still had it. “Where did you get that?”
“It’s been in my family.”
“Who? What family?”
“The Camerons.”
I leaned toward him. “Who are you?”
He pointed to the boy. “Gib Cameron,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
My head reeled. When I was a child I’d decided I’d never meet Gib Cameron in person but I would love him forever. That childhood memory had become a shrine to all the lost innocence in my life.
But now the shrine was real. He was real. “I remember your name,” I said with a shrug.
“I remember yours,” he said flatly. “And it’s not Ann Nelson.”
“Why are you here?”
He smiled with no humor. “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Gib Cameron had finally found me. It was appropriate that he knew who I really was. After all, he’d helped my mother name me before I was born.
Deborah Smith, A Place to Call Home
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