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Sean clued in to her hesitation. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Chapter Twenty-one
Katie took a deep breath. It couldn’t hurt anything to say it out loud, could it? “I’m not sure his being gay is actually the secret that the threats are about.”
“I’m listening.”
She frowned as she thought of the way Judah had changed when she’d tried to steer the conversation toward the threatening messages. It was a dozen tiny things, impossible to describe, but she knew he was hiding something. Her mind kept bumping up against it, the way her tongue would seek out a new filling in her tooth and investigate it again and again.
“I probably shouldn’t even be bringing this up. It’s just, I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to care very much about the gay thing, deep down. I think it will be a relief when he finally comes out. But the messages … They bother him, and he hasn’t told me why. He knows something about them he’s not saying.”
Sean squeezed her hand.
“It’s just a stupid hunch,” she said. “I’ll try to stick to the facts in my report.”
“Don’t d-do that,” he said. “D-don’t apologize, and d-don’t ignore your instincts. You’re good at reading p-people. That’s what I need you to do. P-pay attention to what p-people tell you, but pay attention to how they make you ffeel, too. That’s where you’re going to find the t-truth about them.”
She gave him half a smile in the dark. “Thanks, but I know I’m hopeless at this. Getting Ginny buzzed while she talks about her glory days on the cheerleading squad isn’t going to help Judah.”
“T-tell me something,” Sean said. “Would Ginny ever threaten Judah?”
“Ginny? Are you kidding? She wants to bear his children. She has their names all picked out and everything.”
“Doesn’t she know he’s gay?”
“No. I mean, she knows, but she doesn’t know she knows. Being in love with Judah is, like, college for her. It’s the thing she’s decided to do next after high school. She’s somewhere in her junior year, doing all the hard seminar work, but before too long she’s going to get senioritis and start thinking about moving on with her life.”
Sean smiled, his teeth flashing white in the dark. “Is that what yuh-you were like in c-college?”
Katie shook her head. “I didn’t go to college.”
The usual wash of emotion accompanied this admission, and she dropped Sean’s hand, pulling her knees to her chest. She studied the passenger door handle and willed herself to get over it, already.
Sean’s voice, when it came, had grown tentative. “I th-thought you went to ssschool in Anchorage?”
“Levi did. I worked to pay his tuition. We were supposed to be taking turns.” Her fingers found the naked skin where her ring had been, and she reassured herself the past would stay put.
“But you d-didn’t get your turn.”
“No. I was going to enroll. I’d saved up, but he took all the money when he left.”
“All yuh-your money.”
“He left me the business. Levi didn’t have much of a head for practical things. He didn’t understand that Wild Ride wasn’t worth anything without him, because he did almost all the guiding. It was his personality that brought customers back for repeat trips and got us referrals. People left him huge tips at the end of the week. They loved him. When he left, there wasn’t any reason for me to keep Wild Ride going, and our assets barely covered our debts.”
“It sssounds to me like he robbed you.”
She glanced at him, but it was dark, and she couldn’t make out his expression. Still, the view of nothing out the window was safer. “I married him,” she said to the night. “Your husband can’t rob you, not when you share a bank account.” What was hers had been his, and vice versa. It had been her mistake, and she’d learned to live with it.
Besides, all of that was in the past. It didn’t matter anymore. She’d jettisoned it, sloughed away all those years in Alaska like a locust skin.
If only remorse weren’t so damn sticky. She’d wanted to go to college—far more than Levi had, actually. But he’d convinced her that he should go first, and then he could work on getting their guide business off the ground while she got her degree and helped him out around the office. Then, when it came time to launch Wild Ride, he’d asked for her help for just the first year full-time before she started school. One year had turned into three.
She’d worked twice as hard to save up money for her own school while she paid for his, and in the end, he’d taken it. All that effort, flushed away on the wrong person.
Sean had dropped out of high school, but he’d managed to finish and get through college without any help from anybody. He’d founded his own company and become successful—all in the time it took her to perform her supporting role in the two-bit Alaskan melodrama of Katie and Levi.
She could tell herself not to feel small and stupid—that it was no way for a best self to behave—but how did you do that? How did you just stop feeling ways you didn’t want to feel? Nobody had ever explained it to her. The self-help books were useless when it came to practical matters like how to shut off unwanted emotions.
