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And now he wouldn’t.
I wondered idly if he knew, if he’d seen glimpses of Death at the corner of his eyes, knew that he was waiting.
I tried to remember if it seemed that way, if when he said goodbye to me he knew it would be the last time. Even though I’d only seen him that morning, before I left for school, I couldn’t remember what he said. What I said to him. It was desperately important to remember what my last words were. Did I tell him I loved him?
I didn’t know.
How could I not know? I had the best memory. I played a game with Brock at who could remember the most current patched presidents.
I always won.
But now I could barely remember what my daddy looked like.
It was like Death had snatched not just my daddy’s body and that light from his eyes but all of the memories of him, scratching my mind clean when I was too busy practicing how to pick locks with Steg.
Evie brushed my wild curl away from my face, clearing my dry eyes. “Baby?” she asked. “Did you hear me?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said robotically. “Daddy is dead. I heard you.”
She flinched like I’d hit her, her grip relaxing on my shoulders.
I hadn’t planned it, but I used the slackening in her grip as an opportunity to yank myself away from her grasp. I escaped hers, but not Death’s, its skeletal hands still digging into my shoulder so deep I was sure it drew blood.
I didn’t look to see.
I reasoned that I just needed to run fast.
And I did.
It was the first time I’d ever done something like that. After that, the club, down to the freshest prospect, knew to be prepared against it. These guys didn’t expect it. Which was what made me successful.
Which was what got me miles away from the club, sitting at the end of a wharf, dipping my toes in the ocean as it gushed forward at high tide. I was wishing it might swallow me up. That’s how I discovered another first on that day: no matter how hard you tried, wishes never came true.
I didn’t hear his approach because of the roar of the waves, because of the deafening cry of the pain echoing in my ears. It was only when his lanky body folded down next to me that I realized Death and I had company.
The ocean swallowed my swift intake of breath.
It wasn’t Cade, as I’d expected it to be.
It wasn’t anyone wearing a leather cut.
It was a tanned and lean teenage boy wearing a navy-blue tee, neatly pressed so his sculpted and tanned arms snaked out of it perfectly. His mussed hair blew in the wind, and I gaped at his glassy blue eyes. They almost matched the water I’d been wishing to drown in.
I got my wish then. A different kind of ocean swallowed me up.
Luke.
I didn’t know how he found me. Didn’t know, at that point, that half the town, including his father, were so focused on the death of my own father that only one person noticed me missing.
Don’t ask me how he knew I was gone. How he knew I was sitting on that wharf. How he knew to gently engulf my small and pale hand in his large and tanned one. Knew not to say a word but just to sit with me, holding my hand and watching the ocean.
I didn’t know any of it. I only knew that it was the first time Luke Crawford, the sheriff’s son and the future sheriff, saved me.
It wasn’t the last, either.
Luke
Age Fourteen
Luke couldn’t remember when exactly he stopped looking at his father as a hero.
He couldn’t exactly remember when he started to, either. It seemed he’d always thought of his father as that, in that way that everybody who has a decent dad who gives them time, attention, teaches them how to ride their bike, play catch, winks at them at the table when their mother is chastising them both for having candy and not having room for dinner.
There was all that normal hero worship that every kid had, every child should have had if they had a father who was doing their job right.
Then there was something more than that. There was Luke watching his father drink his coffee, read the paper, have his mother kiss his clean-shaven cheek and hand him a soft-boiled egg, wheat toast, bacon on the side.
OJ for vitamins.
He’d be wearing his uniform, collar unbuttoned, gun belt absent—it hung at a hook beside the door, where he’d put it every night when he got home, too high for Luke to reach.
Luke would eat his Froot Loops or Cheerios, watch his father read the paper, dip his toast into the yellow of his egg.
“You gonna catch the bad guys today?” Luke would ask.
