Page 87 of The Grief We Hold

I take a sip of the icy cold beer before repeating everything for him. At this point, I have nothing to lose. I’m not going back to work for her. So, I lay it all out for him.

When I’m done, Wraith holds out his hand. “Phone.”

I grab it from my pocket but pause before giving it to him. “Why?”

“I want to put my number in there.”

“Oh.” I hand it over and watch as he puts it in.

“What name do you want to put in for me?”

I smile. “Shouldn’t you decide that?”

He grins, types for a moment, then closes it before handing it back to me.

Then he grabs his own phone, keys something in, and my phone rings. Two words pop up on the display.

My Man.

And given I’m very much coming around to the idea he might be, the gesture makes me smile, even in the midst of everything going on around us.

“You can change it if you want,” he says.

“I’m still married,” I blurt, terrified it’s going to change the way he sees me.

“You intend to change that?”

“I’ve already started the process.”

Wraith takes my hand and kisses the back of it. “Good.”

“Good? That’s it?”

“You deserve a man who’ll take care of you. If you were my wife, there’d be no way you’d be living in a shitty one room above a hardware store with two towels on rotation.”

“Maybe if I hadn’t married a con man, I wouldn’t have had to run.”

Wraith smiles, then kisses me. “Tell me about him.”

“Can you tell me about Hallie and Lottie first?”

He leans back against the sofa, then looks up at the ceiling. “Hallie was the first person I met in this town. My plan was to drive through, but I stopped at the diner for lunch, and there she was.”

He smiles softly at the memory, and I have a flinch of jealousy. We met in the diner too. Did Wraith compare the two meetings?

But I stop myself from spiraling. Hallie is dead. How can I be envious of a ghost, just because she loved him, and he loved her first?

“She was sweet. Pretty. So, I found myself hanging around the town. One day. Two days. Then a week. Before I knew it, I got myself a job, just so I could stick around. Then I asked her on a date. We got married eighteen months later. Nine months after that, we had Lottie.”

His fingers on the back of the sofa play with my hair as he speaks, spinning locks of it around his finger before releasing it.

“You must have been a happy family.”

He looks at a photograph on the side table. Hallie is grinning at Wraith, who is holding Lottie to his chest. “Yeah. We were. And Lottie. Fuck…she was my everything. Thought I wanted a boy until that little girl was sitting in my arms, looking up at me with eyes just like mine. She was a disaster the first six weeks, always crying. But Hallie had so much patience with her. Watching her with Lottie made me love my wife even more.”

I swallow hard. But I agreed to tough conversations. “Those times are overwhelming and challenging and joyous and terrifying.”

Wraith sighs. “They were. I mean, we weren’t perfect either. I was prospecting, and Hallie didn’t love that I was out all the time. Between work and the club, I had little time left over. But she also understood because her family was Iron Outlaws through and through.”

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