Chapter 29 Apologies
Apologies
Abby raised her fist but paused with it a hairsbreadth away from the door. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and exhaled. The tight ball of anxiety under her breastbone was shiver inducing. She could get through this. She just needed to knock.
Three sharp raps on the door later, she wanted to bolt down the stairs and to her car, drive away, and disappear.
But nothing happened. She cocked her head and listened. Did she work herself up into almost vomiting only for Tinker to not be home? She knocked again and waited. Nothing.
She threw up her hands. All that anxiety for nothing. He wasn’t even home. She’d practiced their entire conversation on the drive to his house. Reworded it probably ten times. Emphasized different words, different consonants, modulated her tone. Was it too sharp? Too pleading? Too desperate?
Her plan to show up and launch into her speech without giving him any time to prep was out the window.
“Damn it,” she muttered. Shaking her head, she pulled her phone from her back pocket and unlocked it.
“Are…you…busy?” she said to herself as she typed.
Dots appeared immediately and she almost dropped her phone.
In the garage.
Why?
Abby stared down at the wood slats under her feet. Unfortunately, she didn’t magically develop X-ray vision to see what Tinker was doing.
She shoved her phone into her back pocket as goose bumps flowed across her skin. “You can do this,” she whispered. “You need to do this.”
Concentrating on each step, she descended the stairs and walked around the corner of the building to the door of the garage. She raised her fist, but hesitated, then tried the doorknob. It turned easily under her hand and the door swung open silently.
Tinker stood at a metal bench toward the back of the garage, half turned away from her, his head lowered toward something in his hand. He raised it to his ear, and she realized it was his phone at the exact moment hers rang in her back pocket.
Tinker turned at the sound and ended the call before Abby could get the phone out of her pocket.
He stared at her. Waiting.
Right, this was her move. She crossed the floor until she was a few feet from him.
“Hi,” she said lamely.
“Hi.”
Abby opened her mouth and closed it. Everything she had rehearsed flew out of her head. The gentle, but clear opening? Gone. Her unemotional explanation about how she felt about finding out his past? Au revoir.
“Are you here to tell me you don’t trust me?” Tinker asked.
That snapped Abby out of her fugue. “What? No.”
He took a step closer. “Are you here to tell me to fuck off?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Tinker nodded shortly and closed the distance between them. One hand slid behind her head and the other around her waist, jerking her to him. His mouth closed over hers and every single thought flew from her mind.
He was the one with the presence of mind to end the kiss. He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing heavily.
Reality intruded. “We do need to talk.”
He nodded, not lifting his head from hers. “I honestly didn’t expect to see you again.”
“Why?”
Tinker raised his head. “Because very few people ask why—they just take off.” He dropped his hands and stepped back. “I get it. It’s a huge fucking red flag.”
What would she have done if she’d found out on their first date? “I can’t say what I would have done if you had told me right from the start. But here? Now? I don’t want to go anywhere. But—”
He tensed and crossed his arms.
“I want to hear what happened from you. I know what the arrest report said happened, but I would like you to tell me.”
“Yeah.” Tinker nodded and took a couple of steps away. Maybe putting distance between them would make the telling easier. All he knew was he wouldn’t be able to get through it if she was close to him.
“I told you pieces of this, so you know our parents died when I was seventeen.” He glanced sideways at her, catching her nod.
“Dani’s MMA nickname is ‘The Dancer.’ She got it because from the age of five until she was sixteen years old, she was a ballroom dancer.
She was a ranked junior world champion and had more titles than I can even remember.
We had moved to Charleston the year before so Dani could train with this dance coach, Dimitrii Popov, who had coached five or six international world champions.
This guy was good, and he offered Dani a spot. ”
Fuck, this was hard. He rubbed the ridge of his orbital bone with the heel of his hand.
“How did you feel about moving to Charleston?” Abby asked softly.
“Me?” He tried to remember how he felt back then. “I didn’t mind it. It sucked changing schools and leaving all my friends, but Dani and I have always been close. I was really proud of her, and I knew it was a great opportunity. We went to every single one of her competitions.”
He chuckled as a memory surfaced. “We’d been here a few months, and some dumb ass tried giving me shit one time because my picture ended up in the local news from one of Dani’s competitions.
My mom used to make us wear matching Team Knight T-shirts.
They were black and the letters were in bright pink sequins.
He thought it’d be cool to call me a fag and try to make fun of me for wearing it.
The next day I wore a neon pink T-shirt that had ‘real men wear sparkles’ written on it in iron-on glitter letters.
Shoved him into the lockers so hard it left a dent. Then I made out with his girlfriend.”
“Of course you did.”
He shot her a grin and shrugged. “I was sixteen.”
“Mm-hmm. Continue, maybe without the commentary on your teenage escapades.”
“Just saying, I rocked those shirts.” Still grinning, he grabbed a wrench from the workbench next to him. Having it in his hands gave him something to focus on. “We were good.
“And then…we weren’t. It was late August and one of those big storms we get rolled in.
My parents were on their way home from date night.
Visibility was bad. Some drunk fuck who thought he didn’t have to obey the laws of physics hydroplaned through a stoplight and plowed into my parents. They died at the scene.”
He turned the wrench over in his hands. The sharp pain of that night had long since eased to a dull ache, but it still hurt. “I had just started my senior year. Dani was in ninth. And it was just us.”
“There was no one else? No other family?”
Tinker shook his head. “My mom’s parents died when we were still kids, and my dad was no contact with his family. I never got the full story, but I’d overheard enough over the years to know they weren’t an option. Neither of them had brothers or sisters. We were it.”
“What did you do?” Abby asked.
Tinker inhaled deeply and let it out slowly.
“We had some money from my parents’ life insurance and the insurance payout from the accident, and we ended up being eligible for their social security benefits, so it wasn’t like I had to drop out of school to find a job to support us.
But I needed a way to support us both long term and prove to the courts I could continue to support Dani.
“I was a few months shy of eighteen, so I took the GED, and as soon as I got the results, I enlisted in the Marines.”
“Why the Marines?”
He gave a half-hearted smile. “They got to me first. The recruiting office had all the services. I was going to talk to the Army recruiter, but the Marine recruiter grabbed me as soon as I walked in the door.”
“Why not the Air Force or Navy?”
“Back then the Air Force didn’t take people with GEDs—I don’t know about now. And I get seasick, so the Navy was out.”
He glanced at her, trying to gauge her reaction so far. She leaned against the half wall that separated the reception desk from the rest of the garage, her arms crossed.
“What about Dani?”
Tinker stared over her shoulder, unseeing. This was when things got hard. “She couldn’t come with me, obviously. I had boot camp, then infantry school, then MOS school. Hell, it was almost nine months before I was able to go home.”
“Did she stay with friends?”
He shook his head slowly. “She moved in with Dimitrii and his wife.”
Tinker didn’t want to continue. He wanted to stop telling the story. Maybe if he didn’t say it out loud, Abby would never need to know.
“Tinker,” she said softly.
He licked his lips and nodded. “They offered to take Dani in. She’d been training with them for almost two years at that point and already spent most of the time with them anyway; she’d basically just be sleeping there instead of at home.
It seemed like a good plan. His wife, Ksenia, was a dancer too.
She was a lot younger than he was—had been one of his students. That should have tipped me off.
“When I came home the first time, Dani was quieter. Withdrawn. I thought it was because of everything that had happened, you know? Our parents died. I left. I told myself she felt abandoned and that was why she was distant.” He put the wrench down and fiddled with a screwdriver. It was easier than looking at Abby.
“I got lucky and was able to get stationed at Beaufort, so only an hour and a half, two hours from here. At first, I was coming back every weekend, but I was fucking nineteen years old. I wanted to party and get shit-faced with my buddies, so the weekends back to Charleston got further and further apart. When I did make it, she was withdrawn. Moody. I thought it was typical teenager stuff, you know. Being mad at me because I wasn’t here every weekend.
I’d feel guilty and come back more often, but her attitude didn’t get better, and I thought, well, if she’s going to be pissy whether I’m here or not, I may as well stay at Beaufort.
We texted and I still called her all the time, but she was either training or with her friends or just didn’t want to talk. Then I got deployed to Iraq.
“Ten months of absolute hell. I tried to call as often as I could, but back then, comms sucked. If you could even get a phone when it was normal hours here, it wasn’t always a good connection.
Half the time there was a comms blackout because of having to notify all the next of kin of the casualties. ”
He tossed the screwdriver onto the bench and turned, leaning against it and crossing his arms.
“I got a Red Cross notification Dani was in the hospital. She’d collapsed at school and was taken to the ER and then admitted.
It took me three days to get home. Seventy-four hours of airports and planes and feeling caged.
When I finally saw her—she was…” He rubbed the back of his head, remembering the first time he’d seen Dani.
“My first thought was what the fuck? It’s hard to describe.
She was gaunt. Not just gaunt, but almost hollow, inside and out.
I knew it was more than depression or teenage angst. Something was really wrong.
“Then she told me she wanted to leave Charleston and didn’t want to dance anymore. That’s when I knew it was more than just teenage bullshit.”