Gun Shy(89)

But I can’t think about Damon anymore. I can’t think about my mother, or my father, or Ray. I can’t think about Adelie Collins and the way she died of a broken heart. I have to think about my family now. My husband. Our daughter. Everything I’ve ever done has been for them, for us, for this.

I didn’t know the depth of love until I stared into my daughter’s brilliant eyes. The color of the ocean, the color of hope, the color of everything I ever dreamed of having. Her eyes are so bright it makes me want to cry.

What big eyes you have, Gracie. Leo swears they’re turning green like his, like mine, but when I look at her, all I see is lazulite blue.





CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE





LEO





“You sure I can take the car?”

Pike’s standing beside me, the weight of every terrible secret we share in the air that hangs between us. He looks how I feel; older, hollowed out, a husk of everything he used to be. I wish for a moment that I could unsee all the things we’ve been privy to these past years, but that would be like wishing away our lives and settling into the same death that has already claimed so many people.

“Yeah, course. It’s not exactly a family car.”

Pike snorts. “Got that right.”

“You sure you’ll be okay with the Honda?” Pike presses, as we look out the kitchen window at Cassie and her picnic companion. We both know he’s not asking about the fucking Honda, he’s asking about Cassie. Will I be okay with the woman who lied for a year and more, who kept a grown man, a murderer, in our attic right above the spot where we slept every single night? I know my brother, and I know that the weight of his concern for me hangs around his neck like a noose.

“Pike,” I say quietly. “You go. I’ll be fine here. Better than fine. I’m happy here.”

“Happy.”

“Cautiously optimistic?”

“I don’t trust her,” Pike says, heat in his words as his eyes narrow at Cassie, outside. “You can’t tell me you trust her, Leo.”

I shrug. “Don’t have to trust somebody to love them.”

“Really? Is that what she said when she told you she loved him?”

Blood rises in my cheeks at the mention of Damon. I count to five in my head as I breathe in. Onetwothreefourfive. I hold for two. Exhale.

“She didn’t love him.”

Pike shakes his head, hands stuffed in his jeans. I know what he wants to say. He wants to remind me about the way Cassie cried and pleaded and screamed when I found Damon and refused her any more visits upstairs. When I coaxed the truth out of her, in between contractions that had her doubled over and vomiting from the pain. When I filled the birthing pool and she begged me to take some water up to him in the attic so that he wouldn’t die. And me, the bastard I am, refused.

I let that motherfucker starve in a pine box with nothing but air to fill his empty stomach, with nothing but the salty sweat on his palms to chase away the thirst. I let him die up there, alone, and the only thing I regret is that I wasn’t able to torture him first. He took everything from us. Everything. So when Cassie was pushing and pushing and screaming his name, pleading for me to help him, she didn’t mean it. She couldn’t possibly have meant it. Pain does strange things to a person.

Pike opens his mouth as if to speak. Closes it again. Good choice, brother.

He wants to run away from here, I can tell. He’s not just edgy, he’s terrified. He’s scared of this house, of what lies just outside, of Cassie. He’s scared of the straw-haired girl we grew up with, the girl who cried when we caught butterflies in jars and insisted on freeing them; My baby brother, all six-five of him, is scared of the tiny girl outside who used to steal his cigarettes and flush them down the toilet to save him from getting lung cancer.

I mean, I get it. If I didn’t know her so well, I’d be scared of her, too.

Cassie’s on a picnic blanket on the grass, her legs curled around to the side as she coos over Grace. Our little daughter is kicking her legs clumsily, her bright eyes focused on Cassie as she pulls faces and chatters away. I’ve never seen Cassie so happy, so full of life.

“That baby’s got her daddy’s eyes,” Pike says quietly beside me. We’re standing at the kitchen counter, the fields green and stretching out for miles beyond our property. I hesitated to call it mine for so long, but I’ve been here for over a year now, and my name is on the title deed, so I suppose it’s mine. Ours.

Unlike our daughter, who might be ours, but is definitely not mine.

Pike’s words are like a stab in the heart, a rip through the careful web we’ve spun all around us. Besides Cassie and me, Pike is the only one who knows the truth. And even though I know Cassie would never do anything to hurt him, the fact that he knows so much makes my skin crawl. I don’t ever want him to say the wrong thing to her. I don’t ever want him to get mad and threaten her. No, what I want — what I need — is for him to be gone. I want him to have a chance. A life. Away from here.

“All kids are born with blue eyes,” I reply, but my words lack any real conviction.

“That’s not your kid, bro,” Pike says. “You know that, right?”

“Of course I know that,” I hiss.

Pike scoffs. “You’re gonna raise his kid in his house while he’s buried in the fucking yard?”