Chapter 6
SEAMUS
By half-past four, the numbers on the spreadsheet in front of me were going blurry. I leaned back in my desk chair, rubbing my eyes. While I didn’t normally sleep more than five hours a night, since the crash I still wasn’t clocking more than a couple hours, and I felt it.
Only this time, it wasn’t just the nightmares keeping me awake.
“I told you that you ought to stay home,” Dad had said when I’d turned up to the office this morning.
“We’re too busy,” I said.
He huffed, but he knew I wasn’t lying. Reilly and Sons was growing—we had more business than we knew what to do with these days, given the effort I’d put into taking those bigger-scale jobs.
Dad and I had argued about it this morning—he reminded me he’d wanted to keep doing the smaller house renos, while I wanted to take on more commercial projects.
But Dad and I argued about a lot of things.
And he wanted me to take over the business, if he ever got around to retiring, so he usually put up a fight but let me win.
Still, now I wished I hadn’t bid on so many jobs this summer. We’d hired a good number of sub-contractors, but we needed permanent help in the office now, too.
It couldn’t have been a worse time to get into a goddamned accident.
It couldn’t have been a worse time for my head to be everywhere but here.
But there was something else. I pulled up the email I’d minimized a few minutes ago.
It was from someone called Graydon Mitchell, CEO of Grayscale Contracting, over in New York State.
I’d met him and his partner, Chris Slade, at a building conference last year in NYC.
They were from the town Eli used to live in, and he’d given me Graydon’s info and told me to look out for them.
Gray and I had bonded over a talk from this Japanese architect we were both really into.
As it turned out, Grayscale and Reilly had similar business models, and we’d kept in touch to share trade news and updates on our various projects.
We’d always joked about collaborating on a project one day, but it had always been just that—jokes.
We worked in different states and were both booked years out on home jobs.
But now, Graydon had a real opportunity for me.
He wanted to bid on a massive hotel project in his county, Jewel Lakes.
It was a luxury, near net-zero hotel property, 350 rooms plus a conference center, and way too big for them to handle on their own.
The project, called Flux, would be featured in magazines and trade shows around the world, and would boost our portfolio into the stratosphere.
But it would also take me away from our business here.
And it would mean I’d have to pass on the Rolling Hills job, if Cass decided to offer it to me.
The Rolling Hills job was big too, but not that big.
But it was local, which was a huge draw. Having our name on that project would cement us as the top builders in the region.
They were both incredible opportunities.
You’ve got about a month to decide, Graydon said in his response to me after I’d asked him to send me the info. He’d signed off with, Please think seriously about it. It would be a blast working with you, buddy.
I shut the email for the tenth time that afternoon and kneaded my neck.
Maybe leaving Vermont for a bit would be the best thing for me. It would force us to hire a third like we needed to anyway—Dad could get used to some new faces around here.
But it would mean leaving him. Leaving my place.
Leaving Quince Valley.
“You need anything before I go, honey?”
I looked up to see Joyce Cruz, our long-time receptionist, standing in the doorway of my office, her eyes slanted in motherly concern.
She looked different, I noticed vaguely.
Her silver hair was done in a stylish swoop, and I think she was wearing rouge on her round brown cheeks. Or was that blush?
She lowered her glasses, her smile-lined and conservatively made-up eyes inspecting the shadows under mine; her hands-on-matronly-hips stance, taking in the weariness considering my slumped shoulders.
I looked like shit, I knew. This morning when I’d passed the bathroom mirror on the way to the shower, I’d been shocked at my appearance.
Not just the circles under my eyes and bruise on my lip, but what looked like new lines on my forehead.
I didn’t have any gray hairs, somehow—my hair was as dark as ever, but it was only a matter of time, I knew.
Especially at this rate. I was thirty-five, on my way to thirty-six in a few months.
I knew I looked as wrecked as I felt. Still, I put on a smile for Joyce. “I’m good, Joyce, thanks.”
I could tell she was itching to tell me to go home, but Dad must have had a talk with her because she pinched her lips shut and pressed her hand against her collar, looking like she was biting back words.
“Really.” I sat up to show her.
Joyce looked up and blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry. I made it through the whole day without crying.”
So much for my winning grin. “Shit, Joyce—”
She shook her head. “I’m just so glad you’re okay, sweetie.”
My chest tightened. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like being mothered by her.
Other times—like when she tried setting me up with one of her multitude of grandnieces and second cousins twice removed—not so much.
I didn’t love interference with my love life—in fact, I preferred not to have a love life at all, thanks.
But she’d been with us since our very first day—through our darkest days.
She’d been at Kevin’s funeral; later at Mom’s.
I stood up and went over to her. “I’m all right, Joyce,” I said through my tightening throat. I pulled her into a hug, trying not to wince as her tight squeeze met my bruised ribs. “Promise.”
Promise I’m alive, anyway.
Joyce hung on for a long moment, then finally backed away, clutching the door.
“Did you get a haircut?” I asked, wanting to pull the attention off me.
To my surprise, Joyce blushed. “Oh, you noticed.” She pressed a hand to her hair. “I’m going to the theatre tonight. Thought I’d put myself together, you know.”
I remembered, vaguely, that people had lives outside of work.
Joyce pulled her purse back up on her shoulder. “Anyhow, you should talk, young man. Even looking like you haven’t slept in a week, you look awfully handsome in that sweater.”
My first thought was I never sleep. Still, I looked down.
I thought I’d pulled it on over my button-down without thinking this morning, but in that moment I knew why I’d worn it.
Mom had knitted this sweater for me. She’d taken up knitting in the years before she passed.
I had dozens of them, but this one was my favorite.
I wore it when I felt like I needed strength.
It’s Irish wool, Mom had said about this one. Her eyes had been so sad. But she tried to be, if not happy for me, then strong. Came from a farm in County Cork, not too far from where your grandfather grew up.
Embarrassed, I looked back up at Joyce. She knew exactly where it had come from. She’d been good friends with Mom.
For a moment, it looked like she was going to tear up again, but she lifted her chin as if shaking it off. “Will you check in with your father tonight? He’s stressed to heck about this party, but refuses to let me help. It’s gone beyond the point of stubbornness.”
“Yeah, of course.” Dad was planning a party to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Reilly and Sons Contracting.
Party planning was as antithetical to my father’s whole identity as it was to mine, but he insisted on doing it himself.
“You’re bringing in most of the work these days anyway,” he said.
It was true, though he didn’t know the half of what I was planning.
I hadn’t even hinted at the possibility of the Jewel Lakes job.
Normally, Dad would get Joyce to help out with something like this, but she didn’t know the party was going to double as a surprise retirement party for her.
After the electronic chimes indicated Joyce had left the building, I stretched out in my seat, alone for the first time since I’d left home that morning. But as quickly as I did that, the thoughts I’d been shoving aside with work and keeping up my ‘I’m fine’ facade all day came flooding in hard.
Last night, my now-regular waking nightmare of the crash was interspersed with a new activity for my brain—going over everything that happened yesterday.
Eli at my place, more emotional than I’d seen him in a long time—and that guy knew how to show his emotions. Me seeing his fist flying at my face and not only not stopping it, but welcoming it.
Chelsea, jumping out of Jude’s jeep.
Chelsea, looking out over my ridge, that thing she said about sunrises sending something jagged to my chest.
The way she’d looked at me, like she was so lost.
Chelsea.
That last part—that’s what I replayed the most as I tossed and turned. It hadn’t been long, but each second had felt loaded with all the things I’d left unsaid.
I ran my hand over my jaw, feeling the stubble gathering there already.
I often regretted the few words I did speak.
But with Chelsea, it had been different.
All the things I wanted to say to her felt backed up in my throat.
The worst part was that she didn’t hate me for what happened.
While the relief of that had been overwhelming then, now it felt like a lie.
I hadn’t told her everything that had happened before the crash, in the cab, because it hadn’t seemed relevant.
But I couldn’t help thinking that if I had, maybe she’d hate me enough to see the truth.
That I was just bad luck.
I made a feeble attempt to work for the next half hour—checking to see if Cass had emailed me back about the Rolling Hills job, but of course she hadn’t.
I knew things were delayed because of the crash.
Then I started thinking about Chelsea again, and that’s when I threw it in.
There was no point in staying. I locked up the office and headed for my truck.
Soon I’d be home, where I’d maybe grab a cold beer and a paperback and settle into my hammock to watch the sun set over the trees.
The door to my truck made a loud crank as I pulled it open a few minutes later.
I still wasn’t used to that, but it made sense—the vehicle had sat mostly unused for 20 years.
This wasn’t my truck, of course. Mine was totaled, probably already squashed into a metal cube over at the Greenville auto-wreckers.
This was Kevin’s.
Dad kept it parked in the old barn at his place.
Every so often, if I was over there helping him with something, we’d bicker about it.
I’d tell him he needed to get rid of it, he’d grunt and say we might need it.
I knew he just couldn’t let go of it. He’d bought the thing for Kevin’s sixteenth birthday.
It was a jalopy, but he’d gotten me—at twelve—to help him fix it up in secret in that barn. Six months later, Kevin was dead.
Dad had turned up at the hospital in it the night of the crash. I’d had no words, not just about the truck, but about anything. I’d been even more shocked when he wrapped his arms around me and I felt the soft silence of his sobs.
“Goddammit, Seamus,” he said gruffly when he pulled away. “Goddammit.”
I’d driven him home, then turned around and gone right back to the hospital. There’d been something prophetic about driving my dead brother’s car to see the woman I nearly killed.
I sank into the cab now, scrubbing my face with my hands.
Then a sharp slice of pain cut across my face as my hand brushed my lip.
I sucked in a breath—yet another reminder of yesterday.
Of course, thinking of the crash once again had me thinking of Chelsea.
Of the way she’d looked standing in my field, the evidence of what I’d done all over her beautiful face.
It made sense how I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
It was all the crash. Sure, I was attracted to her—how could I not be?
She was beautiful, even now—especially now, when she thought she wasn’t.
But we’d been in a traumatic incident together, that was all.
Besides that, she was Eli’s little sister, and she’d been in a rough place even before what happened.
What had happened in that cab before the crash—that was just Chelsea being self-destructive.
She’d had no feelings for me. I had to remember that.
I remembered the sadness in her eyes.
Only an asshole would take anything more from that.
I was so distracted as I pulled into my driveway, it took me a minute to register there was another car there—a little beat-up red Civic.
I killed the engine and got out. When I walked by the car, there was no one inside.
Had they parked and left? Broken down, maybe?
And who was it who drove this kind of car?
I felt like I knew, but it was only when I walked around back and saw my back porch, lit up with the glow of the sunset that I knew.
That was Chelsea Kelly’s car.
And that was Chelsea Kelly, asleep in my hammock.
My stomach clenched. I gripped my keys in my hand, staring at her for a long moment.
She was wearing a wool coat, snug jeans that hugged the soft length of her legs, and red Converse sneakers.
Her face was still bruised, her hair choppy.
When I saw it yesterday, I could tell by the way it stuck up in all different directions that she’d cut it herself.
That she’d hacked away at it like some kind of self-punishment.
She didn’t know there was nothing she could do to make herself un-beautiful.
One of her arms was thrown up over her head, and her lips were slightly parted. In my mind, I saw her opening them for me in the truck that night, their pink plushness making my insides do all kinds of not-good things.
Jesus, what the hell was wrong with me? I spun around, rubbing at my neck.
I should have woken her up; told her I’d drive her back to the hospital. That she had to stop running away. Or I should have called Eli, to tell him to come collect his sister.
But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I went inside and grabbed a blanket, laying it softly across Chelsea. Then I sat down in one of the Adirondacks a few feet away. I tipped my head back and closed my eyes.