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“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, pressing her lips to my skin.
I touched my chin to the top of her head and held her body to mine. “Don’t be.”
“Well, I am anyway.”
She squeezed my waist, and my hands flattened on her back, pressing her to me closer, harder. Wishing I possessed the ability to make her atoms fuse with mine.
“How much time do you have before work?” I asked, hating that she had to leave at all.
She lifted her arm from my waist to check her watch. “About an hour.”
I tipped my head so that my lips touched her hair. “Okay. I’m jumping in the showerreally quick, and then I’m making breakfast.”
She smiledagainstmy chest. “I’ll wake Noah up.”
I watched her leave the room as my mother’s voice lingered in my head.“I love you,”she had said for the first time maybe ever, and, God, how I wanted to believe it.
But, like I had told Ray, I wasn’t sure Diane Masonwas capable of lovinganything—apart from her little pink pills. And I had to convince myself that was okay; I’d been convincing myself of that for most of my life.
And besides,as long asI had the love of Ray, I didn’t need my mom.
I’d never really had her to begin with.
***
The eggs sizzled in the pan as the bread hung out in the toaster, getting ready to pop up and scare the shit out of me at any moment.
Ray sat at the table with Noah, having a conversation about him helping her at the library for the next couple of days until his grandparents got back from their trip to the Poconos.
Eleven played with the dangling ends of my shoelaces, startling every few seconds when the bacon crackled and popped.
Nothing was out of the ordinary. Everything was good. Everything seemed exactly as it should. Yet a cloud of foreboding hung over my head, the same one that had brought that single crow to accompany us on our walk to the beach just the day before. An eerie feeling of unease, the notion that something was about to go wrong …
Maybe things are simply too good, I considered just as the toast popped up, making me gasp and jump.
Ray laughed. “Every single time.”
“Motherfucker,” I muttered, chuckling lightly as I grabbed the four slices of toast and popped two more in.
That’s what it is. I’m just not used to things being this good.
But Seth is out there. Levi is too. And those calls from Mom …
I had told Ray those calls were nothing. I had told her she was just obviously having a bad high. But … what if I’d been too quick to dismiss Ray’s concerns? What if I was wrong and something had—
The sound of a car door closing tore my attention away from the eggs and bacon. I looked up through the kitchen window to find a car parked outside my house, one I didn’t recognize.
Then came the footsteps, crunching over the gravel path to the steps.
“Ray, keep an eye on the food,” I said, already on my way to the door.
My stomach somersaulted with every nauseating flop as I wondered who was showing up at my door at eight o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday.
I opened the door before the visitors could knock, and when I did, my eyes met those of a ghost from the past.
“Soldier Mason?”
I swallowed at my dry throat before I could convince my tongue and lips to reply.
