Page 32

CHAPTER 32

That would teach her not to go to sleep on his suggestion. Now she had to speak about the difficult stuff. “I don’t know. Aunt Yesenia used to say things sometimes, but mostly when she’d been drinking, and I was too busy trying not to get caught with a backswing to pay much attention.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died in Florida. Liquor and weed. Bad boyfriend.” Her voice broke a little. “Barely made the news.”

“You don’t mourn her, surely?” He was clearly incredulous.

“She was my only living relative. My mother’s sister.” Having his attention focused on the road rather than her made it easier to address issues, and darkness hid most of her feelings. “She wasn’t always drunk and mean. When I was little and crying for my parents, she cuddled me and made me hot chocolate. Eventually the constant moving and fear broke her down. She used to say before she got saddled with me, she had prospects. She had a rich boyfriend, she could have gotten married, she could have had her own children to care for. All true, I think, and another tragedy in this long line of tragedies.”

“I guess I understand.” He spoke slowly, as if he was really making an effort. “I can’t imagine being alone in the world, I’m so overwhelmed with relatives who eat and give me advice and scheme and want me to pay them for support.” She felt him glance toward her. “I share them with you. You’re welcome.”

Because of the bottle and stopper. Because they were now married. He really, really wanted to impress that on her while she really, really intended to pretend it had never happened. Which she did by answering his question about precognition. “I always had a sense for old books, and I used to go to the library to read and feel the connection with the other people who had read that particular story. When I was a teen, I remembered some stuff and I wanted to know who I was and why…it all had happened.”

“Do you remember it all?”

“Enough. The high points. I don’t remember my father. I remember my mother in snapshots. I remember that day when we…killed your father…vividly.” She waited to see how Dante reacted to her choice of words.

As far as she could tell, by the dim light of the dashboard, he didn’t.

She said, “You were scarred by the blast.” Across his forehead and cheek, the divot of the wound looked like a shadowy canyon.

“Broken collarbone. Broken wrist. Unconscious under the rubble for hours. Nate found me first, and when he lifted me, that brought me to consciousness.” He grimaced. “While I was screaming, Andere found my mother. He thought she was dead. I looked over and saw him holding her body, and I thought she was dead, too. That was the only thing that could have shut me up.”

Maybe that’s why he had shown no signs of grief over his mother’s death; he’d already suffered through it.

“When she moved ever so slightly—”

She could hear the relief, the joy, in his voice.

“By the time I got stitched together, even if I wasn’t tough, I looked it.”

“You could have had plastic surgery.”

“No.”

“Tough is good, huh? In your business?”

He grunted, which was no answer. But when he turned the dash lights off, plunging the interior of the car into darkness, she looked out the windshield to see—“Those headlights are coming right at us!”