“Are you following me?” I joke, only to say something that will override the sound of a hurricane between my ears.
“Andrew.” Compassion radiates off her, the fear dissolving like a swarm of emotion broken by some force no one has yet discovered. “What’s going on? Did you and Amanda have a fight?”
“Hah. No. The opposite.”
“The opposite?”
Two opposing forces square off inside my chest while my mind plays the role of whirling dervish, complete with turban and nausea, but minus the poverty. Declan’s groused about the whole “talk about your feelings” bullshit that Shannon and her family engage in.
Maybe there’s something to it.
“She doesn’t believe me,” I confess. Someone is using a jackhammer in my solar plexus.
“Believe you?”
“That I want to marry her.”
Shannon cranes her neck forward in disbelief. “You do?”
“I want to marry her. Really marry her. Propose and the whole bit.” I kick the haphazard pile of rocks at my feet off the edge of the bridge.
“Why haven’t you?”
“Because I lost the ring in Walden Pond,” I mutter under my breath.
“Come again?”
“Because she really doesn’t believe me.”
“It’s a lot of believe.”
“I know.”
She gives me a sad smile. “Congratulations.”
“That is the weakest version of congratulations I have ever experienced.”
“Not for realizing you love Amanda and want to be her husband, Andrew. Congratulations for sitting outside with me and joining the human race.”
“The vampire thing got old.”
She studies me. “Why?”
“Even immortality has its limits.”
She punches my shoulder. “C’mon.”
I look around, my head tipped up to take in the bright blue sky. Some flying insect buzzes by, high near the leaves of the big oak trees at the edge of the path, and I freeze.
“Because thirteen years is long enough for me to torture myself. It’s time to live the life my mother saved.” I look at her, catching her eyes, and she’s blurry. She needs to work on that. How can the edges of her body become so diffuse? “The life Declan saved. Mom paid the ultimate price—with her life. But he paid the biggest price of all of us.”
Her hand is warm and smooth as she covers the back of mine. “You all paid the biggest price. No one’s suffering is more or less than anyone else.”
“Dec had to choose, though. I was out cold. Mom gave him an impossible choice.”
“No. She didn’t.”
“Right. I know. Mom made him pick me.” I huff. “But he didn’t have to, and Dad eviscerated him for it.”
“James can be a hard man.”
“There’s more to it, Shannon.”
She quickens, eyes darting to the field where the boys went. “More?”
“Do you know why Terry stepped down from Anterdec?”
She blinks hard. “No.”
“But you know something.”
“Only Declan’s comment that Terry and James had a standoff after your mom died, and he and James didn’t speak for over a year.”
I swallow, as if the bile can ever go down. “That’s about all I know, too. My dad is at the center of so much anger. So many secrets. When Mom died, she took all the glue that held us together with her and we just turned into a pile of loose, splintered sticks.”
“Your mother raised good sons. Good men.”
“So did my father.” Defending Dad is reflexive. I’ve done it for years without thinking, because Terry faded out and Dec and Dad have such a contentious relationship. At some point, I named myself peacekeeper.
No one asked me to do that.
“Yes,” she says softly. “He did.” She bends down and picks up a handful of rocks, tossing them one by one into the water, staring at the ripples. “When did life become so complex? I thought once I was an adult, it would all be easier.”
“Really?” It dawns on me that I’ve never been alone with Shannon. We’ve worked together and been at family events together, but a conversation like this is new.
“You know how when you’re a little kid, you think that life is one big series of rules you don’t know exist? And you come across them whenever you’re trying to do something really exciting and neat?”
“No. We always knew the rules in advance.”
“How did you learn to take risks? Break the rules sometimes?”
“In school. Work. But not in life. And after the wasp sting, risk was unacceptable. Another rule of Dad’s.”
“Is that why it’s been so easy for you to be outside again?”
“What do you mean?” If this is easy, I’d hate to see hard.
“Once you realized you were living out a rule you didn’t make for yourself, you could drop it.”
A slim, green leaf flutters onto the surface of the water, right at the edge near the bank, and floats on one of the ripples caused by the rocks Shannon tosses into the stream. It catches in an eddy, twirling in a circle over and over until the current is so fast in that little whirlpool that it becomes a solid green circle, all the edges blurred into something new.
“You’re saying I’ve been living life as a vampire not because I’m afraid to die, but because I’m afraid I’ll disappoint my dad.”
She just shrugs and tosses another rock in the water.
It lands right on the leaf, which breaks free from the eddy and wanders downstream, swept away by forces bigger than it can fathom.