The Descent Read Online Free PDF

him. I begged him to remember me. And because it was meant to be—just as you said—he listened, and he forgave me.”
    Adair flinched. “So, you have been with him the whole time we’ve been apart. And was it as you hoped? Were you happy together?”
    I bowed my head. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he should know the truth. “We were happy, yes.”
    He started to turn away from me. “So why have you come here—”
    “Luke died a few months ago,” I said, cutting him off. “It happened very quickly. When he took me back, we ended up living near his former wife so he could spend time with his daughters. He was practicing medicine again, and we’d just gotten the house remodeled the way we wanted.” The words spilled out though I hadn’t planned to tell Adair these details. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. I suppose it was because I’d had no one else to tell. “The illness came on very suddenly. He went into the hospital and never came out. First there were tests, round after round, until they found the problem. A brain tumor.” I swallowed and stared at my feet. “His doctors argued whether it was operable or not, but by then it was too late. Everything started to fail: memory, speech, vision. He had seizures. It was hard to watch.” And hard to relive now in the retelling.
    Adair stared at me intently. “I am sorry.”
    “I stayed in the house for a while. I’d gotten close to his daughters and his ex-wife. They’ve been nice to me, but I think they were beginning to wonder why I was still hanging around. After all, Luke was my only connection to the area. Aside from the three of them, I had no one else, no friends. I’m sure it seemed odd to them, based on what they knew of my past life. They thought it was so glamorous, the home in Paris, all the travel, and after Luke died, I think they expected me to go back to it.” Adair knew, however, that my Paris house was gone: he’d burned it to the ground when he’d been trying tofind me, to flush me out, to burn everything I owned as part of my punishment for what I’d done to him.
    “So, your man is gone and you’ve come to see me,” Adair said. There was a tiny uptick in his tone, a hint of expectation.
    “It’s not like that. I’m not ready to be with anyone yet,” I rushed to tell him, wanting to be honest with him. Believing that I was being honest. I was still raw from Luke’s passing. It had been only a few months.
    Oh, but it was the wrong thing to say to Adair. His face crumpled a bit, and I felt his mood deflate, almost unperceivably. He took a moment to compose himself. “Then why are you here? Don’t play games with me, Lanore—why did you come looking for me?”
    His questions set my heart pounding hard in my chest. The time had come to tell him, to throw myself on his mercy. It felt too soon; I’d expected that we would’ve spent more time catching up, that I’d have a better chance to see where I stood with him, to find out if he’d forgiven me for breaking his heart. I couldn’t risk that he’d refuse me. I needed him. He was the only one who would be able to help me get to the cause of the nightmares.
    The goats chose that moment to come over, staring at us as though they’d never seen humans before. The one with the huge set of horns snorted under his breath as though making up his mind about something, but he didn’t run away when I petted his shaggy head.
    “You’re right.” I dropped my gaze, cowardly. “I’ve come for a reason. There is something I need to ask you to do for me, Adair.”
    Before I could utter another word, however, we were hitby a sudden gust of cold air. A huge dark cloud was sweeping toward us from the sea. It unfurled across the entire horizon, black thunderheads roiling like a cauldron at full boil, lightning bursts blinking deep within the gray swells. A heavy sheet of rain dropped from the sky and swept across the waves, heading in our direction. I’d never seen a storm break