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She couldn’t, though, so she set the thought aside. “I’ll make a pot of coffee. You want breakfast? Waffles and sausage?”
“Not this morning. Just ... toast or somethin’. We gotta get movin’ pretty early. Reed and I’re takin’ the fellas around to look at properties for the clubhouse.”
“Bread isn’t breakfast, Pop. I’ll cut up some fruit, too, at least.”
That earned her a piece of a smile. “That’ll do, sure.” His smile faded, and he nodded at her usual chair. “Sit down first, bear. Got somethin’ to talk about.”
Oh shit. He was upset about last night after all. Rather than jump the gun and try to guess what he’d say, though, Lyra simply slid into her seat and said, “What’s up?”
He folded up the paper so the second page faced up. “They printed a list of names of the victims they’ve identified. There’s still a couple dozen they don’t have names for yet, or they haven’t notified kin for yet, but they printed the names they had.” He pushed the paper across the table to her.
Sensing what he meant her to see, Lyra quickly searched her head for names of people she loved and whether she’d heard from them since the shooting. Her list wasn’t that long: Pop and Reed, Mom, Michelle, Michelle’s mother, Zach ... that was pretty much it. They were all safe. She had a much longer list of people whose names she’d be sorry to see without truly grieving, but ... she turned the paper so she could read it and scanned the list.
Her first thought was how stark the image was, how the tidy print. The spare, meticulous columns seemed to suit the somber task and at the same time be wholly unequal to it.
So many names. Brady Everdeen had wreaked havoc for less than twenty minutes. In that small span of time, he’d killed eighty-four people, including his own family, and injured more than a hundred and fifty others.
She scanned the whole list and saw a few names she recognized, but none she had a strong feeling about beyond her overall sense of sorrow and horror. She had seen the wreckage left behind, the bone and blood, the leavings of mass suffering, and she felt sorrow for it all.
Before she asked Pop why he’d wanted her to see this, she scanned the list again—and this time, she saw a name, not far from the top of the very first column.
Thomas Alan Como, age 26, of Laughlin.
Tommy.
“Oh shit,” she said before she had any idea how she felt. “Tommy!”
“Yeah.”
Sagging back in her chair, she stared at that page until the letters lost form. The shooter had killed Tommy.
She’d loved him—or thought she had, in the immature, half-formed but incredibly intense way a teenager loved—for years. But those days were well in the past, and in the much more recent past, up to sixty seconds ago, she would have said she hated Tommy Como.
Still, her chest and throat felt tight and hot, her breath felt trapped in her lungs, and her eyes itched with burgeoning tears. “Tommy,” she said again, and the word broke on a sob.
She put her hand to her mouth before more of that could come out.
Where had he been shot? The lobby or the casino? Had she cleaned up the leavings of Tommy’s death yesterday and not realized it? A moan slipped from her, and she pressed both hands over her mouth.
“Lyra,” Pop said, his smoke-roughened voice unusually gentle and soft. “Look at me, bear.”
She dropped her hands and looked up from the paper. Her father’s face was calm and kind, with sad concern tightening his edges. “Things went wrong between you two, and I’ll admit I had the thought to kill that boy more than once, but he was in your life a long time. I know you loved him once, and that’s not something that ever dies all the way out. You feel what you need to feel.”
Mom often said Pop was cold block of concrete where emotions were concerned, but that was utterly wrong—and Mom knew it.
He wasn’t touchy-feely, he had trouble saying the words he was expected to say when he was expected to say them, but he felt and understood the full range of human emotion, and he recognized their call in others. How else would he have known the exact right thing to say to her now?
“I ... don’t know what I feel,” Lyra told him.
“That’s okay, too.”
Too shaken to work through the snarl in her head at the moment, Lyra stood. “I’m ... gonna make breakfast. If I cut up some cantaloupe and casaba, will you eat those with your toast?”
Pop also understood when emotions couldn’t be released, so he didn’t push her further. “Sure. We still got some of that honey butter you mixed up?”
“Yeah, a bit. I’ll get it out.”
Lyra busied herself in the kitchen and focused on the tasks there, making her mind narrate her work so it wouldn’t scamper off into mischief. In that way, she focused herself so completely she thought of nothing else and was hardly more aware of her surroundings than the work of making a light breakfast required.
