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“You wanna talk about this now?”
“Not particularly.” He stretches his neck. “Just… should never have let a woman get between us.”
Damn straight, he shouldn’t. Not for a two-faced liar like ‘Sammy.’
I keep my expression blank like the saint I’m not. “I have many sins, Bast, but I’m loyal.”
“You are.” His mouth turns down at the corners, and I know that’s about as much as we’ll be discussing anything Sammy-related today.Thank fuck.“If you visit Mom ever, I need to warn you about something. Seeing as you’re the new marshal and all.”
My brow lifts at the abrupt shift in topic, but I chuckle when he elbows me in the side and whistles the theme tune toBrooklyn Nine-Nine. “What?”
“You can ignore it because it’s mostly her illness doing the talking, but she has this habit of taking the truth and bending it. Like this crap about us imprisoning her.
“Last week, we had a massive grain delivery and no one could watch her. She wouldn’t take her meds so we locked her door. We try not to, Cody, believe me. But we did. She takes that situation and makes it her own?—”
I angle my head to the side. “Why are you telling me this, Bast? I know you’d never do anything to hurt her.”
“It’s not about her this time.” Studying his boots, he draws his hat off his head and dusts it on his knee. “If you’re around her, she’s bound to… She’ll claim your Uncle Clay didn’t die of natural causes.”
I take a half-step back. “She believes he was murdered?”
“Yeah.” He plunks on his hat. “She does.”
Tee
Zee and I were in the same class as Jamie Frobisher so I know him. Not very well, seeing as it was Zee, Marcy, and me against the world.
Until Marcy ran away.
Or, until whatever it was that happened to her,happened.
The three of us were Pigeon Creek’s version of the nerd girls—too uncool to live. (Not that I’ll admit that to Zee.)
Even if I wanted to smile at the memory, one that Jamie would probably snort at because he’d remember exactly how weird we were, I don’t.
I can’t.
Not when he’sthis.
Jamie was our contrast—too cool for Pigeon Creek. Too cool for school. Too cool for everything. Yet, here we are. Me, humming a song I wrote a decade earlier for a musical his momma directed for the drama society. Him, sagged in his chair, tears rolling down his cheeks because said Momma repeatedly tried to tell me that he was imprisoning her in her bedroom every time I stopped humming.
The worst part of this horrific morning is that his tears are quiet.
He’s not sobbing, or sniffling, or even weeping. They’re just there. His pain embodied in droplets of liquid because that’s the only way he can express his grief over being a witness to his mom’s slow and bitterly unfair demise.
“Do you remember the lyrics, Mrs. Frobisher?” I prod gently.
“Elena, dear,” she chides. “You must call me Elena. I remember who sang it—Barry Ryder. I wonder where he is now.”
Jamie and I share a look, but he answers: “He died. Heart attack, Mom.”
She blanks him, her gaze fixed on me. “Dear?”
“He passed away, Mrs. Frobisher.” When she clucks her tongue, I mutter, “Elena.”
“You wrote this, didn’t you?” Jamie asks.
“I did. Barry sang it terribly.”