The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(40)

He’s blushing so hard his cheeks are practically glowing above his beard. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

“Yes, you did,” I giggle.

“Yes, I did,” he sighs.

“And here I thought all the laughter was in the living room,” Bran says, walking into the kitchen.

Ian looks up at him and freezes, wide-eyed, and I burst out laughing again. Bran looks between the two of us, clearly curious, but I’m laughing too hard to talk and Ian’s blushing too badly to ever want to talk.

Shaking his head, Bran absently kisses me on the temple on his way to the coffee maker on the counter. “I am not asking,” he mutters.

That sets Ian off into his great big Santa laughs, belly-deep and loud.

Still shaking his head, Bran walks back out of the kitchen without another word.





14

We don’t stay particularly late at Vic’s, even with the lure of the girls’ arrival. It’s been a long few days, and with no real leads, the next few days will likely be worse. And then, too, there’s the meeting in the morning to walk Watts and Dern through Ian’s suspicions. On our way out, Priya grabs me and hugs the absolute stuffing out of me.

“I know you can’t talk about the case,” she whispers into my ear, “but is he going to be okay?”

“Okay-ish,” I answer, using the word she introduced into the team’s vocabulary. I squeeze back and kiss her cheek. “Just be you. That’ll help more than you know.”

“This sucks.”

“Yes, yes, it does.”

She laughs softly and gives me a small push out the door. “I’m glad he’s got you, you know.”

“He has all of us. You know, in whatever way doesn’t make that sound like he has a harem.”

She just laughs harder and turns away.

Priya Sravasti is a profoundly sneaky person. It’s not a bad thing, certainly I’m not making moral judgment upon her, but she is very, very sneaky and uses it the most for the people she loves. Knowing how long it takes Bran to drive between Vic’s house and my apartment, granting time for both a general farewell and a private goodbye, getting up the stairs, changing to pajamas, and settling onto the bed or couch, she sends a text exactly at the moment that I’m comfortable enough to try to let the day go. I’d call it coincidence, but it’s happened too often to be accidental.

The message has a link, no context. I click it, reading through the article that pops up. A woman’s fiancé and his best man—her brother—were on their way to the church for their wedding when they were stopped behind an accident. A school bus on a weekend field trip got hit by a semi. They got out of their car to help get the children off the bus, some of them injured, all of them scared, and were still on the bus when the gas tank the rig was hauling exploded. The bride had just gotten into her dress when they got the call from the state trooper on the scene. She was a widow barely an hour before she was actually a wife, and she lost her brother as well.

It’s a long article, focusing on her grief and the ways she slowly began working through it, the things that held her back or tripped her up along the way. And she talks about the dress, how she hated the sight of it but couldn’t get rid of it.

Like I said, Priya is sneaky.

Eventually, on what would have been her fifth wedding anniversary, this woman went to town on her dress. She cut the dress into strips, took nonpuff 3-D fabric paint, wrote a message on each strip, then dropped them all into a punch bowl to be drawn at random.

You can be sad today; go through the photo albums.

Make cupcakes and give them away.

Sand and paint the splintering bench.

Buy two bouquets. Keep one—you deserve it. Give the other to someone who looks like they need it.

Unwrap the last wedding gifts. It’s time.

There are dozens of strips with instructions ranging from silly and sweet to heartbreaking and hard, but all of them have a common theme: mourn and move forward. Be kind to yourself.

Barely two minutes after I finish the article, there’s another text from Priya. What is it that’s holding you back?

I don’t know. Not really.

Every time, I try to understand, and I don’t. I just don’t. I don’t know why I can’t get rid of the fucking dress, why I think keeping it will stave off some disaster.

But Priya knows that, so she doesn’t push it further. But as I fall asleep next to a teddy bear in an FBI windbreaker sitting on what’s long since become Bran’s pillow, I think of the first strip of instructions. You can be sad today.

How many of us allow ourselves to just sit with a feeling like that rather than try to conquer it or push it out of the way?

Too few hours later, my alarm brings me out of bed with uncomfortable fuzziness in my head. I end up drinking half my carton of orange juice before the sugar high flings me into something like wakefulness. It also makes my hand twitch and shake as I try to button up my shirt. Yes, today is off to a wonderful start.

When I arrive at the conference room, bakery box in my hands, Gala is already there, adding a third monitor to her set-up. No, not a monitor; a television.

“Morning,” she says, mumbling around the two cords between her teeth.

“You’re here early.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she sighs. “I kept thinking of Detective Matson’s files. I gave up and came in to scan what he had so I could throw together a presentation for the meeting.” She takes the cables out of her mouth and plugs them into the new monitor. “We can cast it to the TV, and this way everyone will be looking at the same thing at the same time while he’s walking Agent Watts and Agent Dern through it.”