Page 56 of The Lovely and the Lost

I closed my eyes.Girl.

Running—

Hurts—

The fragments of memory stabbed at me like shards of glass. I breathed in, and I breathed out, and I breathed through them. Mac’s massive hand covered mine. I forced my eyes open. I didn’t like being touched. I didn’t like to show weakness. I didn’t know this man.

But somehow, I didn’t want him to let go.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Mac said. “Having ghosts. It took me a long time to learn that, a long time to feel like I was fit for human company, and even longer to believe: The things that haunt us, theymakeus human.”

He laid my hand gently in my lap and reached up to unclasp a pendant he wore around his neck. “When I met Cady, I was sixteen. She was fourteen, nosy, and somehow figured out that I was living in my car.”

I thought that maybe he’d changed the subject for my benefit, to make it clear that he wasn’t talking to get a reply.

That let me form one. “I bet Cady didn’t like that.”

“Me living in my car? She hated it. Somehow—and to this day, I don’t know how—I ended up living on the Bennett property.” He looked down at his massive hands. “I built the place myself.”

I thought of the makeshift cabin where Gabriel was living. Suddenly and without warning, the dam inside me broke.

“How do you do it?” I asked Mac, rushing the question, the words piling on top of each other like trucks on the freeway. “How do you go out there, again and again, knowing what you’re going to find?”

“I tell myself that I don’t find bodies,” Mac replied evenly. “I find answers. I find lost ones, and I bring them home.”

He held out the pendant he’d removed from around his neck. I realized, belatedly, that he wanted me to take it. As my fingers latched around the gift, my chest loosened enough to stop fighting every breath.

I turned the medallion over to get a better look at it.

“My personal patron saint,” Mac offered. “The Wades—lovely bunch that we are—happen to be the world’s worst Catholics. You’re looking at the patron saint of lost causes.”

My fingers tightened around the medallion.Saint Jude.A breath caught in my throat, and slowly, I began to understand why Cady hadn’t been glad to see Mac, why I was okay sitting next to a complete stranger, why Saskia had let him pet her. Mackinnon Wade was calm and collected and centered—andfamiliar.

Ash isn’t Jude’s father.Before I could say anything out loud, Cady came back to retrieve me and took us home.

When I was younger, I had trouble closing my eyes. I needed to be able to see things coming. Changes to routine, sudden movements, unfamiliar environments, unfamiliar people—those sent me straight to high alert.

Surprises were indistinguishable from attacks.

Jude had made it his mission in life to run interference on my behalf.Not this time.I felt motion sick, though I knew the gut-rending nausea had nothing to do with the way Cady was driving.Jude can’t run interference, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that Mac is his father. He doesn’t know, and I do.

As a child, I’d been taught by specialist after specialist to recognize, regulate, and appropriately express my emotions.How do you feel?The question was a thorn, wedged into my flesh.How do I feel?I thought angrily.

Ifeltlike I’d seen a mass grave. Ifeltcomplicit in the way that Bella Anthony’s story had ended. Ifeltlike I had no right to have been the one that Mac told about Saint Jude.

“Out.” Cady didn’t bother to issue separate orders to the dogs and the three of us when we arrived back at the house. She didn’t say a word to Free, Jude, and me about the way we’d moseyed right into a crime scene. Part of me wanted her to read us the riot act. At least that would have been predictable.

“Go on,” Cady said once we were inside. “Pack your bags. We leave in the morning.”

Jude and Free bolted for the stairs like prisoners who’d received a last-minute stay of execution, but my feet felt like they’d been welded to the entryway floor, my chest muscles tightening like a vise around my lungs.

“We can’t leave,” I burst out.

“We’re search and rescue, Kira. If you choose this life, you won’t always like what you find.” Cady could have stopped there, but she didn’t. “Do you think I wouldn’t give my right arm to bring that little girl home? Do you think I wanted it to end like this?”

No.That was what I meant to say. What came out was “It’s not over. It can’t be.”

I’d stepped back from this search, and where had that gotten us? A barking cadaver dog and unmarked graves. I could picture Bella’s blanket in my mind. I could feel it in my hands.