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She smiled sadly. “Very pragmatic,” she said.
“What else can you do?” he asked, and he seemed annoyed, with her, with the world. “Because if you stop you admit the bad stuff has won, don’t you? All you can do is keep going. Refuse to be beaten, even when you are beaten. The bad stuff only wins if you let it. I refuse to be beaten, Cassie. I refuse.”
She had never seen him like this, she realized. This was the side of him he had always kept from her. This was the bitterness and the anger at all that life had done to him.
“I refuse, and so should you.” He jabbed a finger at her. “Whatever you need to do, you get it done and you move on. Put it behind you and survive.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That sounds good.”
They sat in silence again. Cassie was surrounded by the sounds andsmells of her childhood, and it comforted her, the closest thing she could get to a mother’s hug.
“Stay there a minute,” her grandfather said. He got up from the chair with a grunt and wandered along to the door to the house. He disappeared inside, and Cassie heard him moving about in the kitchen. When he reappeared a moment later, he was carrying two bottles of Coke. He passed her one and she took it as he sat back down next to her. “Let’s have a drink,” he said. He used the bottle opener on his key ring to open them, a couple of quicktsks in the quiet night, and then they tapped their bottles and Cassie took a slug of the drink. The fizz and the sugar shocked her awake.
“Is this the last time I’m gonna see you?” her grandfather asked, peering into his bottle.
“I hope not,” she said. “I hope I’ll see you again.”
He nodded at that and then smiled at her. “Good,” he said. “It’s good seeing you like this. Older, I mean. It’s good talking to my granddaughter as an adult, not as a child.”
“It’s good talking to you as an adult,” she agreed.
“So talk,” he said, lifting his bottle to sip from it. “No need to rush your drink. If you’re a time traveler, you can go back whenever you want, right?”
“Right,” she agreed again, smiling.
“So enjoy your drink and tell me something about your life. I want to know what the future is like.”
She thought about it for a moment, and another two cars passed on the road out front, traveling in opposite directions toward each other, like medieval jousters, their headlights lancing the night.
“Okay,” she said, and she spoke until she was finished with her drink, telling her grandfather a tale about a magical book that could open doors to anywhere, and her grandfather listened with the wide eyes of a child enraptured by a story at bedtime.
A Plan in Five Parts
The next morning, after the night of pizza and drinks and chat, Drummond sat on the ground in front of his motel room, facing the parking lot and thinking about what kind of man he was. For a long time he had been a man who had run and hidden, because that had been the right thing to do. He was still certain of that—he could not have fought the woman, not ten years ago, and not since.
Not on his own.
Now it felt as if he had friends again, people he shared a cause with. He told himself he was reading too much into one night, into pizza and drinks, but he hoped he was not. He wanted friends. And he wanted people to help him. Because it was too much on his own.
It was a beautiful day, the sky above bright blue; it felt warm already, and Drummond enjoyed the sensation of the air on his face. He enjoyed just watching people coming and going, the traffic out on the main street. And then he saw Cassie emerging from the door to her room across the parking lot, and she smiled an acknowledgment, and walked toward him, and he enjoyed that too.
“What are you doing?” she asked, sitting on the ground next to him.
“Just enjoying the peace and quiet,” he said. “Thinking about what we need to do.”
“Yeah,” Cassie agreed, her eyes narrowing as she gazed into theparking lot. She ran her hands through her blond hair and pulled it back behind her head into a ponytail with a hair band.
“I think we should all go get breakfast,” Drummond said, and Cassie looked at him. “You and me, Izzy and Lund. We should sit together and eat, just like we did last night.”
“Why?” Cassie asked. “I’m not disagreeing. Just wondering why you’re suggesting it.”
“Two reasons,” he said. “Because I like it. I like the company. I like all of you, and it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed being around other people.”
“Okay,” Cassie said.
“And second, because we need to make a plan.”
He looked at her.
