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I inhale sharply. Stories like that are so few and far between, so fantastical that they sound made up. I almost wouldn’t believe it, but Ransom and his brothers and his granny are right here, living proof of the most amazing lives and the most incredible stories. “Wow. That’s…that’s crazy,” I stammer.
“That’s what I call fate. Or at least a very fortuitous day for me. I might have had a shitty first thirteen years of life, but they prepared me for everything after, which was not shitty. Granny is…I know you heard her say at the club that the mafia murdered her husband.”
“I…I did want to ask about that, but I didn’t know how. I wasn’t really sure I’d heard her right.”
Ransom sighs. He peddles a little harder without realizing it, and our boat surges ahead, the big swan head leading the way. “You did, unfortunately. Her husband was doing some work for the wrong guys, and when he figured out who they were, it was too late. He died in a ‘mysterious’ accident, and Granny was lost without him. They didn’t have any children of their own. He was her everything. She says it was like crawling through a huge dunghill. Eventually, she picked herself up and enrolled in computer courses. This was in the days of the infancy of the internet, but she met lots of super helpful people. I think she really just wanted to find a way to meet people again, and she didn’t have any education to get a job to look after herself. She took student loans like everyone else and started some business courses, but she liked learning about computers the best. Knowing Granny, I think having a problem to solve, something that could be taken apart, put back together, and then fixed, made her feel better.”
“It was something she had control over. Something that made sense when nothing else did.”
“I think so, yes. She met a lot of people who had similar, and by similar, I mean more advanced interests, and that was history too. Once they started figuring out what they could do with a computer and the internet and how everything was moving in that direction, including crime, I think it just clicked with her. She drove herself to learn, and my god, did she learn. Years and years later, after doing her work alone for a very long time, she met me. I was the first hissy, spitty, mostly ungrateful, partly feral brat she adopted. Then came my brothers. All of us had shitty starts in life, but that turned around when we met Granny. She saved us, made us healthy, and gave us an education, though it was pretty unconventional and mostly online, so we could get our GEDs, since some of us had barely been in school, ever.
“Most importantly? She taught us her trade. She taught us…” His voice drops to the smallest whisper, even though we’re out in the middle of this great big artificial hoop lake thing that runs past the park and the boat rental area, and we’re pretty much alone. “She taught us how to hack and how to make the world a better place with our brains and skills. It’s not just her mission to bring down the men who murdered her husband. She did that. It became her mission to help people who were just like her and just like us, and that became more than our mission. It became our passion.”
Umm, okay, so I’m kind of in awe at the moment. I’ve been in awe of Ransom before, but nothing like I am now. Geez, I feel like a whiner for having issues about my mom leaving me when I knew full well that there is so much worse in the world. I get that things are relative, but this person before me has literally lived years and years of hell, and he’s come back. Not only that, but he’s kind. He’s good, he’s loyal and brotherly, and he’s a great human being.
I can imagine him holding our baby, promising him or her that he’ll do anything to protect them, always, and that he’ll always be there for them and love them. A child who looks just like him with dark hair and stormy gray eyes. I can almost see the look of tender love on his face, and my god, I’m just wrecked.
Wrecked sitting here beside him, clutching his hand while his powerful legs work the swan boat.
I look behind me quickly, more to move my eyeballs around to erase the big-time sting going on there, and my gaze lands on Cass behind us. She’s looking at Lennox, talking away, and he’s staring straight forward, peddling the swan dutifully, even though it looks painful for him to sit there and listen to whatever she’s talking about. I know from personal experience that Cass can really get going when she wants to, and I want to laugh at the thought of his ears bleeding from her constant chatter, but he’s putting up with it because he’s still in the doghouse for kidnapping her ass instead of mine. Not that he wouldn’t still be in the doghouse if he’d kidnapped the right person.
