Page 69 of Ricochet

“Stop beating yourself up. Blue didn’t do it for you, okay? He did it because that’s what he was trained to do. I trained him to guard you. It’s my fault.”

The gold of her eyes dulled, and her refusal to look at me told me shame plagued her mind. “I just … can’t stop seeing their faces.” She shook her head, eyes wet with tears. “And … I tried to fight them off, but …”

“They were three men with guns, Aubree. Anybody would’ve been afraid.”

“Except you.” Her eyes shot to mine, staring so intently I almost had to look away. “You seemed … different tonight. Almost like you snapped. I was scared … at first.” Her gaze lowered to my bare chest, forcing me to shift on the bed. Running her hands through her hair, knees still pulled tight to her chest, she closed her eyes and drew in two long breaths. The tightness of her jaw and the painful-looking knit of her brows softened. When she opened her eyes again, they remained directed on my chest. “Dylan Thomas.”

The name, completely out of context, caught me off guard. “What?”

“The quote on your chest. A poem from Dylan Thomas. My mother had a large book of poems that I must’ve read a thousand times as a child. I remember that one.” Her eyes tracked back and forth to each side of my chest. “The tattoos … what do they mean?”

Two sets of sound waves inked on each pectoral were the beginning and end of my son’s first newborn cry. I’d uploaded the recording into a computer sound wave generator and had it made into a tattoo design. Over my heart, were two stars, one outlined with my wife’s initials, one with my son’s. Both carried the date of October 30, 2012—the date of their death. Below the stars was Thomas’s quote:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I’d had it tattooed when Jay was first born. Three months premature, he’d spent the first sixty-two days in the NICU, fighting for his life. As a result, I called him Jay Louis, after the famous boxer, Joe Louis—my little champ.

The very thought incited a sharp sting in my eyes and nose with the threat of tears. How could a child, who’d fought so hard to live early on, be taken away so young?

“The stars … they were … something I used to tell my son. When he was young, he’d asked me what happened to my wife’s father, who’d passed away when Jay was three.” The memory filled my head, no less vivid than if I still sat at the edge of my son’s bed, talking with him before he fell asleep:

“Where’s papa?”

“Well, he’s no longer here. He’s up in the sky, looking down on us.” Jay’s small chin peeks over the spaceship blanket as I tuck him in tight.

“How? Does he live in space?”

The question makes me smile, and I run my fingers through his soft, downy hair. “The stars in the sky are the souls of the people we love. They shine so bright, not even the night can hide them. And when we’re lost, they guide us.”

“Will you be a star someday, Daddy?”

“Someday. When you see one shooting across the sky?” A sweep of my hand over him illustrates the visual. “That’ll be me, saying hello. I’ll watch over you on the darkest nights. And just before the sun rises, when it’s time for me to sleep, I’ll whisper in your ear, see you in the night.”

A tear slips down his cheek, and he tucks his face in the pillow as though hiding himself.

“Hey, why the tears, buddy?”

“I don’t want you to die. I don’t ever want you or mommy to die.” He sniffles. “I’m going to pray every night that you don’t ever become a star.”

His comment brings a contradiction of laughter and sadness at the thought of ever leaving him alone someday. I wipe his cheek and kiss his head, letting him pull me in for a tight hug, when he wraps his arms around my neck. “Everyone becomes a star eventually, Jay. But no matter what happens, or where I am, part of me will always be here,”—I rest my hand against his heart—“with you.”

“How?”

“Your heart was made from mine.”

He glances down at his chest and then to mine. “Am I in your heart, too, Daddy?”

“Always.”

“Nick … what happened to your wife?”

Aubree’s question ripped me from the memory, and I could feel the beating against my chest—the punching on the outside from someone trying to get past the armor and steel that caged me in.

I’d only been asked the question once before, by a therapist, and I never returned after. Alec never asked. Lauren never asked. I’d never talked about the murder to anyone. I couldn’t. That was a box best kept locked and stored away. I had no idea what unleashing those memories into the open might do to me. Like Pandora’s Box, it contained my greatest pain in the world and my deepest, most intense love. My firstborn son would always hold a prominent place in my heart, and his mother, my first love, was the only woman in my life who had the power to destroy me. Losing the two of them took me to depths of pain I couldn’t even remember, places so dark I feared them myself. I drowned myself in memories of their voices, their touch, the feel of them in my arms. And when those sensations had begun to fade, I replaced that soul-crushing misery and despair with anger. Anger so venomous and lethal, I’d become more beast than man. I dreamed of blood on my hands and tortuous screaming, not from my wife and son, but my victims—the men who hurt my family. I wanted a pound of flesh for every year that I’d miss watching my son grow up.

Opening that box was dangerous. Talking about them, without the protective coating of wrath to keep my insides insulated from the pain, could’ve left me blacking out and waking up to bloodstained sheets, and Aubree’s lifeless eyes staring back at me. It was bad enough that she knew anything at all about my family, that she had some curiosity to explore and tease out when I might’ve let my guard down.