Page 34 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Shay

January 2014

Two months before the kidnapping

Shay didn’t tell Callum about Max.

She didn’t know why precisely. As her husband, Callum was family now. But she liked the memory of Max in her arms, both of them seeking comfort in the other. Sisters had a bond that couldn’t be rendered null, even by husbands.

Callum was tired. Shay had pretty much been thinking that since they’d met, but it had settled deep into his bones now. She finally talked him into taking a Friday off a few weeks after Max’s unexpected visit.

They woke up incredibly early and made the four-hour drive to Cannon Beach. With the sun in their eyes and the window down on the unseasonably warm day, it almost felt like Texas. Spiritually, at least.

By the time they made it to the small Oregon town, the parking spaces had pretty much filled up. They managed to find something outside a small café, and they ordered cappuccinos and drank them at the two-top folding tables on the sidewalk.

Shay had packed them a lunch, which they took to the beach, the haystack formations looming large in front of them.

There were tourists everywhere, which was fine because they were tourists, too. Shay always hated people who complained about the very thing they were contributing to. They found a section in the back corner of the beach and laid out the blanket and cracked open the canned wine Shay had packed, each taking one. It was barely lunchtime, but vacations were for booze and sea mist in your hair—Shay would never be convinced otherwise.

Shay stared out into the water and wondered why all her best days revolved around the ocean. Was it the endless expanse, the opportunities it offered? Was it the salt-scrubbed feeling she left with, her skin raw but clean? Was it just the quiet, even with people buzzing about everywhere, that soothed the battered part of her that always worried about everything?

Maybe it was a combination.

“Tell me about something you love,” Shay said, shifting to get a better view of the sprawled Callum. He was uncharacteristically disheveled, and she loved it. He wore his polish as armor, a way to keep people from finding any imperfections. But now he was relaxed in jeans and a polo. For anyone else, that was barely dressing down, but for Callum, it was progress.

His eyes were closed, his lips tipping up. “I love you.”

“Stop.” Shay shoved at his shoulder and he barely moved. He was lean but incredibly strong, something she’d always found hot. “You know what I mean.”

“I love to keep score at baseball games,” Callum said. “It’s kind of looked at as an old-guy thing. But my mom used to take me, and she taught me how to do it. Three weeks before she died, we saw a no-hitter together. I have our cards framed in storage.”

Shay breathed in, breathed out. It was strange the things you learned about someone after years of being together. “That must have been a pretty clean card.”

He huffed out a breath. “Yeah.”

“We should hang them,” Shay said, nudging his thigh with her knee. “The scorecards.”

Callum chewed on his upper lip, the way he did when he didn’t want to smile too big and give away all his messy emotions. “I’d like that.”

“Why did she start liking baseball?” Shay asked. She didn’t want to stumble into stereotypes, but she would have been less surprised had he said his father was the one to take him.

“Her father played in the minor leagues,” Callum said. “He was awful to her. He hated his life, wanted to be better than he was. He took it out on my mother and my grandmother. And for some reason, my mother walked away from that loving baseball.”

“You’re the psychologist, you must have theories about why that was,” Shay said.

“I think if I was telling anyone else, I’d say it was because the game is predictable in a way,” Callum said, staring up at the sky. “And there’s ways you can track it, control it, and make it make sense. You can’t do that with abuse.”

“But it’s me . . . ,” Shay prompted.

“And so I’ll say, I think she loved baseball because her father loved baseball,” Callum said. “Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Family’s complicated.”

Shay flopped onto the blanket and thought about her own circumstances. She hated Hillary, and yet, when Hillary asked, she gave her a place to stay and then looked the other way when she dipped into Shay’s wallet.

You could love something and hate it at the same time.

“She changed what it meant,” Shay said. “For you.”

“The fingerprints are still there, though,” Callum said. “The bruises. I like that part of it, too. That she found her own way into giving it to me.”

“You never watch baseball,” Shay said, and only when the words left her mouth did she realize there was probably a reason for that.

“I went to a game the day after she died,” Callum said. “I have the scorecard. But that’s the last one I’ll go to.”

Shay felt like she should have known about all this before now. But she wasn’t into sports, never thought to ask about them.

“You know you’re doing okay, right?” Shay asked.

“What?” came from her left.

She pushed up onto her hand so she could study his face. “You think you’re failing on the Alphabet Man case, which makes you think you’re failing at life. But that’s not true.”

“I think his victims might disagree,” he said, almost meanly. Almost. But he had never been cruel to her once, not even when they fought.

“What do you think his answer would be?” Shay asked, because she knew it would throw him off.

“On something he loves?” Callum asked.

“Yeah.”

“Killing people,” he said, straight-faced.

“Come on,” Shay said on a laugh. “Everyone loves something.”

“Language,” Callum said after a moment. “I don’t understand how he uses it. But he loves it.”

Beau had never excelled at English. She wasn’t sure why she had that thought, but it popped into her head, fully formed.

“Do you ever start seeing killers in the people you love?” she asked.

He sat up at that. “What?”

“When you profile someone, do you start finding those characteristics in the people around you?”

“Sure, it’s natural,” Callum said, and Shay relaxed. That’s what she’d thought. “Why? Who do you suspect?”

Shay coughed, hating that he was so perceptive. “No one.”

“Come on,” he said, and then half tackled her to the ground, his fingers finding her soft, ticklish spots. She laughed until she gasped and cried uncle.

“Sometimes, I think I could fit the profile,” she admitted, a half-step admission.

“You’re thinking about Max,” he said, because she’d never been able to hide anything from him. Although, apparently, in this she could. Because she was no longer worried about her sister.

It was her other sibling who concerned her.

“No,” she said quietly. “Not like you think. Not like Beau thinks. Not like Max thinks.” She paused, trying to decide if she should confess to her past transgressions. “I did something bad once, though.”

Callum made an inquiring sound.

“I found a box ...” Shay waved that away. The details didn’t matter. “Anyway, I freaked out. I visited her psychiatrist completely out of the blue and semi-forced the woman to deal with my panic attack about Max hurting someone.”

“Oh, babe,” Callum murmured.

“I’m not proud of it,” Shay cried. “I thought Max might end up ... I don’t know. There are school shootings every day now, it seems.”

“But she’s never displayed anything like that,” Callum reasoned. “Which is what I’m guessing the psychiatrist said as well.”

“Yeah, you got it in one,” Shay admitted. “I just get a little weird about Max, I can’t help it. She’s so cold sometimes that it makes me want to start researching sociopathy.”

“She’s not a sociopath,” Callum said.

“How do you know?”

“Because she loves you,” he said easily. “Very much so. In a way that’s not self-serving at all. That girl would go to war for you.”

“I would kill for you,” Max had said. Shay had believed her. But there was something different about hearing it from Callum’s perspective.

“Did you know there’s a warrior gene?” he asked.

Shay squinted over at him. “No, but that sounds far more romantic than it probably is.”

Callum huffed out a laugh. “It is not romantic at all. The gene predisposes people to violence. Which, of course, during our medieval days would have meant the person was thriving. Hence, there’s still people who have it. But it can lead to ... well, serial murder, among other things.”

“I would kill for you.”

“I brought you here so you wouldn’t have to think about serial killers,” Shay said as lightly as she could. “And here you are, thinking about them.”

Callum laughed. “That’s not your fault. It’s all I think about these days.”

Shay straddled him, ending up in his lap, her knees on either side of his hips. “Are you so sure?”

“No,” Callum said, and pulled her down into a kiss.

They didn’t once mention a serial killer the rest of the day. Instead, they chatted about nothing. At one point, Callum chased Shay into the freezing-cold sea, and she dragged him in behind her. Ocean mist touched both their cheeks, and Shay couldn’t help but think that it was all so different from Texas.

But water had a way of making it all seem like home.

A beach. Someone she loved. The sea-salt air in her lungs.

Callum had so few perfect days to give that when they came, Shay would hoard them to her chest, a jealous dragon.

“Do you think you have that warrior gene?” she asked sleepily as Callum drove them home, into the moonlight this time.

“I want to say something cool right now, like ‘I think you have it,’” Callum said, with a half smile. “Because we associate warriors with being strong and amazing.”

Shay laughed. “But we don’t romanticize the warrior gene in this household.”

He reached over, laced their fingers together. “Exactly right. I think you have the brave gene. The courageous one, the kind and fair and strong ones.”

“Sap,” she said, and he laughed, bringing her hand up to his mouth to press a kiss on the knuckles.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I think you have all those, too,” she said, because she wasn’t sweet to him enough.

The quiet smile that tucked itself into the corners of his mouth reminded her to say nice things to him more often.

“I do have a warrior gene,” she said. “Just to protect you, though.”

“Hey, what did we talk about?” he asked, humor lacing his voice. He glanced over at her. She would never get tired of that look on his face.

Shay had always thought herself so hard to love. Hillary had never loved her; Beau and Max did, but that was a different kind of thing altogether. They’d gone through war—that kind of life solidified bonds without there needing to be any love involved.

Callum had chosen her, and continued to choose her every day. Even through the rough patches, he still looked at her like he’d burn the world down if he ever lost her.

He turned his attention back to the road, but the warmth of his gaze lingered.

“I have it, too,” he murmured. “Just for you.”