The sudden and profound relief that Doyle had beenwrongnearly had Larkin as giddy as a schoolboy.It wasn’t two or more stalkers, and the Honda Civic wasn’t connected to Adam Worth.It was just a journalist—the same fucking journalist from earlier in the year—who’d clearly been lucky in his bit of online snooping to have discovered Noah, but not enough to have learned of the pending divorce.Joe had been hanging out around Larkin’s former residence because the bastard thought Larkin still lived there.
Connor was going to have a stroke when he found out how close the media had inadvertently gotten to this case.
“Fourth degree stalking is a misdemeanor,” Larkin said.“Do you want to spend the next three months on Rikers.”
“Larkin!”
Larkin glanced to his right.Doyle was running toward them, coming up on the movers outside the funeral home across the street.
Joe’s objections grew louder and more frantic.“It’s not like that.Everyone wants you, Mr.Larkin, from the rags to theTimes, butIcan tell your real story without all the pandering Sherlockian bullshit.Consent to an interview—”
From the corner of his eye, Larkin saw a car slow at the intersection.He glanced sideways at… a blue Honda Civic.The passenger window rolled down, a sharp, cigarette scent wafted out; then there was a flash of a muzzle, a deafening boom—and Larkin’s face and chest were splattered with blood as Joe slumped out of his hold and collapsed dead on the pavement.
Larkin looked down.
Joe’s mouth was agape, his eyes wide as if surprised.A small entry wound glistened from the middle of his forehead.Taken out execution-style.The exit wound behind his right ear pumped a steady stream of wine-red blood into the gutter.
—rain and whiskey and blood like ahell-brothboilandbubble—
Larkin raised his head, and the pistol was leveled at him.
—“Since the day we met—I knew I was in love.”—
CHAPTER TEN
—sun-bleached planks rough against his skin, beads of water dripping like tears, dandelion heads a breadcrumb trail leading out farther, deeper, the lake a black hole of tannins and misery, and Patrick had jumped off the dock, swallowed whole by its gravitational pull.
Larkin sank down after him and Patrick was there, asking, “Do you think we’ll be together forever, Everett?”But Larkin couldn’t breathe underwater, couldn’t speak underwater, couldn’t tell Patrick’s memory that next month would be the eighteenth anniversary of his passing, the eighteenth year that Larkin was haunted by childish rhymes:he loves me, he loves me not, the eighteenth year that Larkin had grown older without him, had become a man without him.
A night of alcohol and kisses and murder for the hundredth, thousandth,millionthtime, only this memory, this confrontation with death, was met with being pulled up, toward the breath of now, the luminosity of today, life and love forevermore—
“Evie?”
Larkin blinked.He sat on the curb, elbows on his knees, a half-empty water bottle in one hand that he didn’t remember taking a drink from.
Doyle was crouched before him, and the way the evening sun hit his dark brown eyes—pyrite flecks shining like stardust—it was an all-access pass to his soul.Larkin saw a man who wanted to cry, to scream, torage.He saw the ugly tragedies that had fashioned Doyle into the man he’d become, the knives in his back and Band-Aids holding his heart together.But despite the twisted shapes Doyle’s hope and happiness had become, they cracked pavement like tree roots—stubborn and unrelenting—striving for the light.
It felt like the world had gone silent and still around them.
“Since the day we met—I knew I was in love.”
Into that quiet, Larkin realized for the first time that he’d associated dying, not with guilt, but with love.And in doing so, he’d glimpsed an understanding of what it meant to exist: of life and death as a spectrum.Man’s will yearned for purpose, and the purpose of senseless suffering was guilt.All that anger, uncertainty, could haves, should haves, would haves gave humanity something to cling to when cast out into the stormy sea of mourning.We didn’t dare let go of what remained of those we so dearly loved, despite the certainty that this guilt was going to drown us, because this wasall that remained.
To release ourselves of guilt would be to forget.
And remembrance was the greatest act of love there was.
But Nietzsche had said that man was a bridge, not a goal, so could such an interpretation of his philosophy of “perhaps” be that, like life, death was just another physical interim?A bridge along the spectrum?
Those we loved weren’t gone.They were simply beyond the bridge, beyond the veil, somewhere that was difficult for us to see.And if they weren’t gone—would never be gone—what use was guilt?It wasn’t a life preserver, but an anchor, pulling us away from the jubilance of heaven.
Man’s will yearned for purpose, so what if, instead, that purpose was to love, and love again?
Over and over.
Forevermore.
Larkin shifted forward, dropped onto one knee, and pulled Doyle into a sudden embrace.He felt as if he’d returned from some faraway mountain peak, born again with a newly learned revelation ready to be shared with the world.But Larkin was conscious of how his complex relationship with dying, with death, was decidedly at odds with typical Western thinking, and that to exclaimno one is truly dead, especially to a bereaved father, wasn’t so simple.
