AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We walk back to my Camaro.
“You nearly had me crying in there,” Burke says. He looks at me. “Thinking about your brother?”
Yeah, maybe on some level. It’s always there, never buried deep enough to fully let go of. My kid brother who vanished while we were out riding our bikes. My mother never quite recovered, and our family fell apart in the waiting years. According to the history I know, some fishermen snagged his body while out fishing for walleye in a lake near our home just a month ago.
But no. I was thinking of Ashley. I nod, however.
“How are your parents?” Burke asks, and I should know the answer, but I haven’t a clue.
In the previous timeline, my mother had a stroke the day she received the long-awaited news.
In this timeline, or at least the one I just left, I remember seeing a picture of them with a parrot and an umbrella drink on a recent cruise, so maybe that went better the second time around. So, “As well as can be expected.”
Burke says nothing and we get into the Camaro and pull out. He’d left his boring Integra at the gym, and we drive back to Carefree Highway, an ironic ballad by Gordon Lightfoot, about picking up pieces of shattered dreams.
Eve is back in my head, my mind circling around her smile, her red hair flinging out of the ponytail she’d shoved it into after the gym, looking at me with those hazel-green eyes, and—
“You think she was pregnant?” Burke asks, turning down the radio. I hate when he does that. Feels like a man should be able to control his own volume.
“Dunno.” I can’t remember from the autopsy, but it seems that would have stuck with me. “Maybe she had an STD test.”
“Working girl?”
I can’t remember, but I hope not. “She didn’t look like it.”
“She might be in the system.”
Most definitely, but I don’t want to sound too eager, so I nod. “Good idea.”
As if fate has my number, Loggins and Messina come on with Danny’s Song, and I hum along.
“You like her.”
I glance at Burke and he’s grinning, his dark eyes shiny.
“Who?” I say, and my voice is too high.
Burke laughs and shakes his head. “Aw, you like trouble too much, Rem. I told you to stay away from her. She’s a blue blood. Imagine what Danny Mulligan would do to you if you two got involved.”
Already done, buddy. Involved with a capital I. But I do make a face because I hated the idea that Danny never liked me.
I’ll fix that, too.
I’m not much of a praying man, but sometimes, like now, I’d like to see what I have to barter.
“I thought you were over her.”
“What gave you that idea?” And now I’ve given myself away, Burke the slick one.
“Just…I don’t know. After the bombings, after the stabbing, she came to the hospital and sat by your bedside. And when you woke up, you barely grunted her direction.”
Oh, I could strangle young me. Apparently, my idiocy started early.
“I was just…I wanted to get back to work.”
“And today? What was that?”
“She looked good, didn’t she?”
