Page 114 of Wreckage and Rain

The phone rings again. VIVIENNE BENNET.

I put the phone in my pocket. I don't answer. I walk past Lorna at the desk and out the front door onto Queen Street, and I keep walking.

The phone rings four more times before I reach the Battery. I don't answer any of them. I sit on a bench at the seawall and watch the harbor. The cannons. The palmettos. The pelicans dive-bombing a school of menhaden a hundred yards out. The big tankers in the distance moving toward the port. The salt and the pluff mud and the wind off the water.

I've lived in this city my entire life. It's not my home anymore, because the woman I love doesn't live here anymore and the family that was supposed to be here isn't one. I'll keep coming back. Greg and Sarah are here, and they aren't negotiable. But I won't live here. I'll live in Chicago, in a small clean life with a small loud family, in a city that doesn't give a single shit what my last name is.

That decision sits in my chest like a smooth stone.

The phone rings again. I put it on silent.

***

Summer finds me on the porch of the B&B in the afternoon.

I haven't gone back to my room. I've been on the porch since I came back from the Battery. Lorna has brought me two more coffees, a slice of pound cake and she hasn't asked any questions. Summer comes around the corner of the house from the garden, where I assume she's been crying or thinking or both, and she stops at the bottom of the porch steps and looks up at me.

I'm in a rocking chair. My phone is face-down on the table next to me. My laptop is closed.

"Done?"

"Done."

"He called?"

"Five times."

"Vivienne?"

"Eight."

"You pick up?"

"No."

"Either of them?"

"No."

She comes up the steps. Sits in the other rocking chair. She has on jeans and one of my old college sweatshirts that she stole again at some point this morning, and her hair is up in the clawclip, and she looks like the woman who used to murder Stevie Nicks in our kitchen on a Saturday morning.

"You okay?"

"I'm okay."

She is quiet. The rockers creak. Somewhere on the next block, a dog barks twice and goes quiet.

"What did he sound like."

"In the voicemails?"

"In the voicemails."

"Weak, his voice cracked on his last message. I've never heard it do that before."

"Sonny? Are you going to be okay with that?"

"I think so."