Page 41 of Whirlwind (Seattle Blades #4)

Kit

T hey won the Stanley Cup. After a few moments of the team celebrating on the ice, Tyson, Cillian, and Zander skated together toward the red line. All three scanned the crowd where the family section was.

I’m sure we weren’t visible in the sea of celebratory fans, but the trio blew kisses up to us, regardless. Lottie jumped up and down next to me, arms thrown in the air, tears pouring out of her eyes as she cheered as loud as she could.

The two of us became quite close during the playoffs. She’s even talking about moving down here to be closer to us.

It’s the proudest I’ve ever been of another person.

It’s a pretty special thing to watch someone you care about fulfilling a life’s dream.

That night, back at home, Tyson told me he needed a few days to get through necessary press and celebrations, but that he wanted to leave for Montana as soon as he’d fulfilled his obligations.

I argued that there was time. He ignored that.

“No. We put it on hold for my career. It’s time to go find out who your mom really was,” he’d said. I didn’t argue after that. It was time. And it felt right having him, and Nightmare, with me on the drive to Montana.

I’d already reached out to Jack Silva, the detective who’d worked on my mother’s case. We’d set up a time to meet. I was surprised when we got to the designated park to find Jack wasn’t alone.

Hannah Markle’s brother, Daniel, was there, too. As we listened to Jack describe what he knew, I caught Daniel staring at me several times.

“Sorry,” he apologized sadly, after the third time. “You look so much like her.”

It turns out, there was never much evidence to go off.

There was footage from hotel security cameras of her leaving the lobby and walking across the parking lot toward a diner.

A waitress there had remembered her, said she’d eaten alone and left without any incident.

That was the last she was seen. The hotel was on the reservation, right near the border.

Her body was found five days later, off reservation by nearly eighty miles.

Jack had been a junior detective, at the time.

He has Crow family members and is sympathetic to their struggles with missing people.

However, the higher-ups in his department, at the time, had little interest in working with tribal police to pursue her case.

There’s no way to know where she was murdered, what jurisdiction it fell in.

Jack’s department didn’t care enough to figure it out.

My mother was just one of many. Tribal police had even less to go on, since her body was found outside of their reach.

“It happened like that a lot, back then,” he’d said. “It hasn’t gotten much better. Part of the reason I left the force.”

He suspects that night—the night before she was supposed to fly home to me—someone had grabbed her on her walk back to the hotel. They brutalized her, murdered her, and dumped her body.

Just like that.

All too common, all too easy. A night for them, a lifetime for me.

They gained whatever it is one gets from such an act; I lost my world.

Maybe whoever did it was eventually caught for some other crime and is sitting in prison, now.

I doubt that, though. It’s far more likely they’ve gotten away with it—and countless other offenses.

Jack apologized profusely for never finding justice for Nimii.

“You did your best, I’m sure,” I’d tried to reassure him. “It’s not you who failed her.”

That made Daniel cry. Before we left the park, he asked me if we’d have lunch the following day and he’d show me where my mother’s plot was.

That’s where we’re at, now—at the diner she last ate at, only a few blocks away from the cemetery.

It’s a run-down place, clean and busy, but with signs of wear.

A lot of life has been lived in these four walls; you can feel it when you walk in.

The staff all look like they’ve spent their careers here.

I wonder, for a minute, if any of them were here to serve my mom that night.

I don’t ask. I don’t want to make it any more real than it already is. This was my choice, it’s where I wanted to be—this last place where she was alive. Free to be herself.

Daniel arrives and comes to sit across from me in our booth.

“Hi,” he says, almost timidly, as if he doesn’t know how to handle this situation any better than I do.

“Hi, Daniel,” Tyson says. “Thank you for this.”

“Of course,” he says. “I want to help any way I can. I…I tried before. When it happened, I tried appealing to your dad. Nimii had so few people in her life, I wanted to be a part of yours. For her.”

“She didn’t have family?” I ask.

“You really don’t know?” His shock is evident.

“He didn’t talk about her. I learned early on that my questions would be met with anger, so I stopped asking,” I say, almost ashamed that I couldn’t stand up to my father as a child and demand answers. “All I know, I’ve only learned since my grandmother passed.”

“Hell, I’m so sorry, Kit.”

We’re interrupted by the server, all of us ordering whatever we see first on the menu. I’m not sure any of us has much appetite.

“We grew up outside of Salem, Massachusetts,” Daniel says.

“She was raised by her grandparents—her mother had perished in a car accident when she was young. I’m sorry I don’t have any information about her dad, but I got the impression he was never in the picture.

Unfortunately, both her grandparents died within a couple of years of each other, when Nimii was in college. ”

“She went to college?”

“She did. Damn, she was smart. She had a scholarship to the University of Maine for mathematics.”

Tyson asks questions, keeping the conversation moving while I take everything in, latching on to the small details that connect me to her. By the end of it, I feel more a part of her than I ever could my father.

“I have pictures.”

Daniel opens a manila envelope and pulls out photo after photo. I study each one for long minutes.

“You’re right, I do look like her,” I say, looking at one of her in a volleyball uniform, her arm wrapped around another girl.

“That’s Hannah, my sister. Hannah moved here with her husband.

When she got sick, I came to help, intending to go back to Salem after she died.

But then, everything with your mom happened,” he says, his voice growing sadder.

“I stayed. The two women I’d loved the most spent their final moments here, and I couldn’t leave. ”

“You loved her?” I ask, popping my head up. His eyes shine, and mine begin to water, too.

“I did. I had for years. It was unrequited, but I’d have done anything for Nimii. She was a special woman with a special spirit. I’m sorry you never got to know that.”

“It matters that she was loved,” I say. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

When I’ve methodically viewed every picture, Daniel packages them back up and hands the envelope to me. A gift, he calls it.

The most precious one I’ve ever received, I think, as we walk to the cemetery. He doesn’t stay for that. Once he’s shown us the way, he leaves to give me time.

Another gift from him—because I sob while sitting on the earth above where she’s interred. Tyson sits behind me, arms tightly holding me together as I try to fall apart.

“It’s stupid, she’s not here,” I say. “I know that, but I’ve never felt closer to her.”

“It’s not stupid, love. It’s natural. It’s human,” he says. “Let yourself feel it.”

Tyson

We’ve been home from Montana for over a month. Kit and Daniel have established a friendship, they talk regularly. Any time she thinks of a question about Nimii, she asks him. He loves to talk about her, and I think it’s been healing for them both.

Something else that has been healing is Kit’s therapy. She found someone to talk to as soon as we got home, and she’s learning new techniques to deal with her biggest anxious moments.

She’s also been learning about her heritage.

The team works closely with the local Muckleshoot tribe, and she’s connected with a few of their members, who are helping her dip her toes in.

Plus, Daniel has invited us back to Montana to attend the annual Crow Fair.

It will be Kit’s first Powwow experience, and she’s giddy with excitement.

She wants to connect with folks from Mi’kmaq at some point, too.

For now, she’s soaking up everything she has easy access to.

Every day, she grows stronger, braver.

Every day, I fall more in love with her.

We don’t spend nights apart. That will change when the season starts back up, of course. I’ll hate being away from her, so for now, I soak up every minute we spend together. Cal’s house has become nothing more than a place I store my shit. I’ve practically moved into Kit’s little bungalow.

I’d offer to buy us a bigger space; except we like it here—at Kit’s shoebox home. She said we should construct an outbuilding in the backyard. A yoga studio and gym. A space that’s mine, free of her sensory clutter.

The truth is, I like her clutter. But she wants me to have everything I need, here, and it’s one more thing to love about her.

“Plushie,” Lottie yells into her microphone.

“Fuck yeah,” Kit replies, excitedly. The three of us are in party chat while we play Palia .

It’s a cozy game that is not at all my speed, but it’s Lot’s current obsession.

If we want to spend time with her, this is how we do it.

If it means I run around a fantasy landscape mining ore and hunting magical creatures, that’s what I’ll do.

What the fuck does it matter, as long as I’m hanging out with my two favorite people.

“Okay, I’m exhausted, now,” Lottie says, the high from her prize wearing off as quickly as it hit. “I’m logging off.”

“Get some sleep, love you, Lot.”

“Love you guys, too. Talk tomorrow.”

Kit tosses her controller and headset aside and crawls into my lap, her hands wrapping around my neck.

“I want to tell you something,” she says, her eyes nervously bouncing between mine.

“What is it?” I cup her cheek, trying to ease whatever she’s feeling.

“Earlier…when Lottie talked about her imaginary future kids,” she says, referring to Lottie daydreaming about someday playing farming simulation video games with her children. “Something popped into my head.”

“Okay,” I say when she pauses, as if she’s nervous to go on.

“I thought about us, you and me, playing with a child of our own,” she says, nibbling at her lower lip. “I see things like that more and more. I’m not saying it’s what I want, because I’m still not sure. But I see it, sometimes.”

“You know I’m okay either way,” I say. I’d love to have a family with her. But I don’t need that more than I need her.

“I know,” she says. “I need you to know, though. It’s too hard to keep to myself and I don’t want to. I don’t want to keep anything from you.”

“I don’t want you to, either.”

“Okay, so then, I need to tell you this other thing, too.”

“What?”

“That I love you,” she says confidently. “Every day, you show me how much you love me, and it makes me fall more in love with you.”

Unbidden, a tear of joy drops from the corner of my eye.

“That’s the best news I’ve ever heard, Kitpu.”

“There was a survey once that found only sixty-seven percent of Americans have ever felt true love. I always thought I’d be forever part of the thirty-three percent that didn’t.”

“And then, Nightmare escaped his harness?”

“Thank fuck for that little escape artist.”

“Thank fuck.” I kiss her.

Life can be a whirlwind. I’m glad we’re weathering it together.