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Maybe there’s room for a sliver of truth. “No. I’m not okay. I keep having these…” and I don’t want to freak her out, so, “visions that Ash is still alive. She’s happy and seven years old and just had a birthday party in our back yard.” And I want her to believe me, to just somehow reach into my brain and see the reality that we just had—maybe can have again if I do this right. “She got ponies and a castle, and more of those stupid stuffed animals, and I spent the entire weekend building her a swing set…”
Her eyes are filling again.
“And I finally found Gomer...”
She wears a sad look. “Rem. You know…you know visions are just visions, right?” It’s like she’s talking to a child. To Ashley, telling her that there are no monsters under her bed.
But there are monsters, the kind that will slink out after I go home and find me, remind me that if I can’t figure this out, then this is the world I’ll have to live in. “I know. It’s just…it feels like it could be real.”
She presses her hand to my cheek. “No amount of drinking is going to make that happen.”
Wow. I must have really taken a dive. “The drinking is over.”
She draws in a breath. Drops her hand.
Good bet is I’ve said that before. “I promise, Eve. I’m not the man who finished off that bottle of Macallans in the recent past. I’m different. Really. I’m…I’m me.”
She closes her eyes, as if my words pain her. “You have no idea how much I want to believe that, Rem.”
“Then—”
“It’s too late.” She opens her eyes. “I didn’t just lose Ashley when she died you know. I lost you too. Your obsession with finding the guy … then your drinking …”
She trails off, the pain in her eyes searing into my heart.
I stare at her, seeing, for the first time, how we got here. I’ve never been good at letting go, at living with questions and helplessness. The search for questions about my missing brother is why I became a detective.
Another tear escapes and she catches it with her hand. “I have no hope left, Rem. I have to move on.”
Move…on? “With Silas?”
At my statement, a horror enters her eyes, and I’m so relieved, I barely hear her when she says, “With my life. The one without Ashley.”
Ah, that kind of moving on.
“The one without you.” It comes out in a whisper.
Anyone else feel the sucking chest wound? I even make a sound, deep inside. My voice betrays it. “You don’t have to move on from me,” I say. “Please, Eve.”
Her countenance falls and for a second, I think she’ll change her mind. There’s something desperate in the gaze that roams my face. I know this look.
“Eve.” I lean toward her reaching up to touch her cheek. “I love you. We have been through so much together. We can get through this.”
She closes her eyes again, and for a moment leans into my hand. Sighs. Then, “Rem, it hurts too much to love you.”
I stiffen even as she pulls away.
“And I think that’s the point, isn’t it? I can’t keep living in grief. My father. Asher. Our daughter. And now you. I can’t watch you spiral out and destroy yourself. I can’t come home again to find you in the bathroom, overdosed. It nearly killed me the first time. I can’t…I just… Let’s not hurt each other anymore, okay?”
I did what?
She gets off the table. “I should probably give this back to you.” Reaching into the darkness, she grabs a file off the table. It’s brown and worn, a rubber band around the contents to keep them from spilling out. It was sitting behind her, on the other side of the table. I look at it and make out Booker’s handwriting.
Right. The Mulligan file. When she picked it up, I haven’t a clue, but I nod slowly. Tuck it under my arm.
She sighs. “Sign the papers, Rem. Let’s get this done, for all our sakes.”
She walks away, back to the house, into the darkness.
