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My heart started to beat superfast, like I had been running a race, and my belly flip-flopped like a pancake in a frying pan.
“Don’t move,” Mammy began to say, but I couldn’t help it. I was already slipping out of the pew and racing down the aisle. “Peter, stop her!”
“Claire,” Dad whisper-hissed, but it was too late.
I had made it back to him. Not stopping until I was right beside my best friend, I slipped my hand into his and squeezed. “I missed you.”
Sniffling, Gerard tightened his hold on my hand and wiped his cheek with the sleeve of his black suit jacket as we trailed out of the church after the coffins. “I missed you, too.”
“I’m glad it’s not you in the box,” I whispered in his ear, leaning close enough so that only Gerard could hear me. “You’re my favorite person in the whole wide world, and I would swap everyone for you. Even Hugh.”
“You’re not supposed to say things like that,” he replied, but he didn’t sound mad. Instead, he tightened his hold on my hand as we followed the crowd toward the graveyard.
“I prayed for it to be you,” I said quickly, needing to tell him all the things I had saved up in my head since the boat. Since the drowning. “When they said someone had been saved from the water. I prayed for it to be you.”
He choked out a sob and turned to look at me. “You d-did?”
I nodded. “I promised God I would do all the good things in the world if he brought you back.” I beamed at him. “And he listened.”
“That wasn’t God, Claire,” he whispered, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “That was your dad.”
“I don’t care who it was,” I replied. “Just as long as you’re here.”
“I don’t think my family thinks like that,” he said, turning back to look at the ground as we walked. “I think they wanted your dad to save Bethany.”
“I didn’t,” I admitted honestly. “I wanted to keep you most of all.”
“Claire, come back to us please,” Daddy interrupted, catching up with us and placing a hand on my shoulder. “You can’t be with Gerard right now.”
I opened my mouth to complain, but Gerard answered for me. “Please don’t take her away from me.”
“Leave them be, Pete,” Aunty Jacqui told Daddy. “God knows the poor lad needs a familiar face at this time.”
Daddy didn’t look so sure, but he let me walk to the graveside with Gerard.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he said when we reached the grave. “I don’t want to go home with them.”
“With your mam and Keith?” Scrunching my nose up in disgust, I muttered, “And stinky Mark.”
Gerard nodded stiffly. “I want my dad.”
“Your dad’s an angel now, though, right?”
He shrugged. “That’s what Father Murphy said.”
“Don’t you believe him?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” he replied, and then he went quiet for a long moment before blowing out a frustrated breath. “I looked stupid.”
“When?”
“At mass.”
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t read it,” he said quietly.
“The prayer?” I asked, thinking back to the prayer Gerard read at the altar during mass. “I thought you were great.”
