Page 54 of After All The Wreckage
“I really think we need to consider the doctors’ recommendation.” She broke the silence, exhaustion and loss in her voice, but also a resolve that scared me.
“I can’t talk about this now!”
“Do you think your mother would want this for you? Buried in work. Spending all your free time with a body that doesn’t speak? I want you to have a life, Rory. She would too. She’d hate that you haven’t laughed in months. She’d hate that you’ve practically given up on the FBI and spend your time darting between jobs in order to take care of her. It has to stop. I can’t support this decision anymore. She wouldn’t want me to. She’d tell me it was selfish to keep her here at the cost of you living the full life she saw for you.”
The sledgehammer finally broke through the wall I hadn’t had the time or strength to fix completely. Silent tears hit my cheeks, and I brushed at them furiously. Hating them. Hating the emotions and doubts that swelled with them.
“The decision isn’t yours,” I finally said, my voice wavering.
“We promised we’d make it together.”
“We promised we were on her side!”
“I know she’d want this, Rory. I know it in the way only a mother knows her child.”
The strength of the conviction in her voice sent goose bumps over my skin. Doubts pricked inside me. Dark whispers about a truth I couldn’t handle and that I had to shut down fast.
Nan pulled up behind my bike. Gage had parked his Pathfinder next to it. Despite everything that had gone down this afternoon, I still longed to know what the doctors had said about Monte’s condition. Worse, I wanted to know how Gage was holding up. Was he keeping it together now that he had his brother back, or were the doubts about Dunn and Demi that plagued me tormenting him as well?
“Parents don’t always know what’s best for their kids,” I said.
“Don’t start comparing me or your mother to Sutton Bishop.”
“Then don’t give up on Mom and me like he did.”
I could see the hurt in her eyes as if I’d slapped her.
I hated myself a bit.
Hated all of this.
I opened the door, pushed out, and turned to look at her. “I’ll see you back at the house.”
She didn’t say anything, and I just shut the door. She put the Bug into gear and headed out of the lot as I made my way to my bike. I looked up, eyeing the apartment above the bar. The warmth of the lights shimmered against the dark storm clouds. It called to the raw, unprotected slivers of my heart that had been revealed by the wall inside me that had broken.
I craved the coziness of the apartment. The sweetness of the little girl tucked inside. The heat of Gage when our bodies brushed. A part of me wanted to stomp up the stairs, pound on the door, and demand answers to why he’d pushed me away. A part of me wanted to kiss him just to see what he’d do.
But if he didn’t trust me, nothing would ever work between us.
I’d known it when I was twelve, and it wasn’t any different a decade later. Our lives weren’t meant to collide in that way. We were simply ships, stopping for a few minutes in each other’s ports. We’d never be the permanent shelter either of us needed.
? ? ?
When I got home, Nan was in the kitchen, banging around. I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t join her. Not because I was throwing some teenager-like tantrum, but because I couldn’t risk facing her with my emotions so unprotected.
Instead, I headed to the office and the manila envelope Detective Muloney had sent over this morning before I’d left for Gage’s. Inside was a note explaining that he was only giving me the information so I’d see there wasn’t much of a trail to follow and to back off and let them do their job. I snorted. I’d stop justlike a runaway truck. I was going to tear through every lie and every barricade that got thrown up.
My hands stilled on the photos of the accident scene. Black skid marks led off the pavement and into the brush where she’d gone off the road. Some of the images showed her car partially submerged in the Potomac, the tree ripping through the driver’s side. Others showed it after it had been towed back onto the road, the front end decimated.
Bile rose in my throat and my skin crawled.
It was a miracle she’d been pulled out at all.
I pushed my fingers against my eyes, fighting another wave of tears. Trying desperately to stack the bricks up against these raging emotions and failing. A few drops squeezed past, dotting the copies Maloney had sent as if they were the rain pelting the cottage windows.
I inhaled and exhaled slowly, wiping my face and forcing myself to concentrate again on the images. What had Dad seen that had made him think it wasn’t an accident?
I shuffled through the stack, assembling the photos in a line as if they were movie stills. Reels frozen in time. The tire marks started pretty far back along the road. Black smudge lines on the dark pavement. I tried to visualize her car in motion. Tried to visualize being at the steering wheel and turning the vehicle in order to make those lines on the road.
