"It's alright," the man on the trail said. "Don't shoot or anything. It's alright."
I felt as though I'd floated off my saddle. The voice was muffled behind a parka and still coming from a distance, but something inside me recognized it as intimately familiar.
My TGV symptoms rushed through my veins in such a surging whirl that I felt dizzy. The only negative sensation I experienced was a faint sense of embarrassment that I'd suddenly found myself irrepressibly wet. I was overwhelmed with an urge not only to sleep with this shadowy figure, but also, in a much more abstract sense, to somehow attach myself to him, in body and mind both, permanently.
"Ian?" I called out.
I slipped from my saddle and hurried up the trail toward him, training my flashlight unsteadily.
He lowered his hood and met my eyes.
But it wasn't Ian.
I froze.
"No, Ashley," my husband said quietly. "It's Shawn."
In the moments following, I was so disoriented by Shawn's presence that I struggled just to determine whether or not the shadowy figures emerging all around us were a threat. Twenty or thirty people were suddenly appearing from behind juniper trees and granite hollows, trudging toward us in the snow.
I stepped backwards, panicking, and nearly fell.
The last time I'd seen Shawn, he'd just shot Bryce Tripp. He'd called me a slut, and he'd even held a gun to my head.
All I could do was stare at his transformed face. It was obviously Shawn, but he'd changed so much that it was hard to believe that this was actually my husband. He'd lost all of his pudgy weight, which had the effect of chiseling out his cheek bones. The look of uncertainty that had always shifted around his eyes was completely gone, replaced now by a pair of steady, confident green eyes.
Someone was calling my name as they approached.
"Ashley? Is that you?"
Finally I understood that, somehow, we weren't in any danger at all. We hadn't been ambushed, as I'd feared.
"Ashley? Oh my God. . . Ashley!" It was my mom.
At last she drew close enough that her face became visible in the moonlight. She was crying.
"Mom?"
She wrapped her arms around me in a way she hadn't done since I was a little girl.
"Oh, my Ashley." She squeezed me tighter and swayed me back and forth a little.
I looked at Shawn warily over my mom's shoulder. All around him, the faces of the "unsanitary" prisoners I'd seen in the locker room were becoming recognizable as they drew nearer.
"That was you?" I asked Shawn. "Today? On the football field? And you helped all these people escape?"
Shawn nodded and looked away modestly. "Not soon enough to save everybody, though, was I?"
I struggled to reconfigure my impression of the entire day: the figure digging in the field; the man in the same black parka dashing toward the burning prisoners; the same figure slipping away through the same loose fencing that Shawn and I once used to sneak away into the woods. That person had been Shawn, my husband, not Ian.
I also couldn't help but remember the overwhelming sensation of desire I'd just felt.
I didn't understand. I didn't understand any of it.
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