Chapter 2
Audrey
The pain behind my left eye has graduated.
It started as pressure this morning, the kind I could press a thumb into and pretend I had under control.
Now it's a thin, bright wire someone is pulling tight from the inside.
The lake is doing it, the way the sun hits the water and bounces back at twice its strength, hammering my forehead from every angle at once.
I forgot my sunglasses on the kitchen counter.
I'm thinking about my sunglasses because the other thing my mind wants to land on is somewhere on the far side of the yard, and I have rules about that.
The barstool under me is hot through the back of my dress. I shift, and the teak sticks to my thighs.
"Audrey."
Nate is at my shoulder. "I want to introduce you to someone."
I look up, squinting into the sun, and immediately regret it.
Behind Nate is a tall, broad man in a navy t-shirt that's seen the inside of a washing machine a thousand times. Sandy hair. A jaw that doesn’t know how to relax. Eyes that have the specific quality I recognize before I have time to name it, because I see it in the mirror most mornings.
The traitor walked Asher away from the bar and immediately—immediately—went looking for the next man to put in front of me.
"Audrey, this is Declan Rafferty. Deck, Audrey Sullivan. Nora's sister."
He extends a hand.
"Hi." The handshake is soft. Careful.
"Hi."
"Deck plays with us," Nate says. "He's our catcher."
"Nice."
Nate hovers for a beat, looking between the two of us. "I'm gonna check on the grill," he eventually says. He claps Declan on the shoulder and is gone.
Declan and I look at each other. There's the briefest pause where I think he might do me the kindness of pretending he wasn't just deposited here.
He doesn't.
"He's not subtle," he says.
"No."
Declan lowers himself onto the stool beside mine, slowly, in stages. He's young, maybe early thirties, but he settles the way my father used to settle into a chair the last year before he died.
For a moment, we just watch the yard. Sophie is tossing floating rings into the pool. Eli is shrieking, a sound that registers in my back teeth, and Nora is talking with some of the other teammates. The smell of charcoal drifts past, and underneath it, the green smell of cut grass.
I'm already running the math on how to leave.
"Nate told me," Declan says, suddenly to his hands. "I'm sorry for your loss."
I close my eyes for a second. Open them after the lump in my throat subsides.
"How long?" he asks. I don't ask how long ago what. We both know what.
"Eight months."
He nods. Small. Unsurprised. Which means Nate has already filled him in, meaning this entire afternoon may very well be an ambush dressed in pool floats.
"Was it..." He stops. Starts over. "Was it sudden, or..."
"Yes."
The wasp on the rim of an abandoned beer can lifts, hovers, then drifts off.
He nods again. "Same."
The admission startles me, and for the first time I look at him properly. He just stares down at his hands.
"You lost someone too?"
"Yeah." His gaze shifts to the edge of the yard, straight ahead. "My wife. And our unborn child. Two years ago."
The grief gives way beneath my feet. I can feel the sinkhole start to pull me under.
"How?" I barely manage to get the word out.
"Car accident. You?"
"Heart attack."
The yard goes far away for a second.
"Sorry." He shakes his head. "I don't usually..." He trails off. He doesn't finish it. Doesn’t need to.
Two years, and he lost it all. I reach for something lighter. "You can lead with whatever you want."
"That's generous,” he says, glancing over.
"It's the rules. You lead with whatever you want, and I have to nod."
He laughs once, dry. "Same for you?"
"Same for me."
The wire behind my eye tightens. I press two fingers to my temple before I can stop myself, and of course Declan catches it. Grief teaches you to read other people's bodies for the things they aren't saying.
He doesn't ask, and I appreciate it more than I can tell him.
After a minute he says, "Your kids the ones in the pool?"
"Yes. Sophie and Eli."
"How are they holding up?"
"They're good." The silence stretches. "Sophie's, ah. She's been quiet. Ever since..."
"Mm."
"Eli mostly just..." I open my hand, then close it. "He doesn't know what to do with it. So he doesn't."
Declan nods like that's familiar somehow, the kind of nod that says I know what you mean even though I shouldn't, and I have to look away for a second.
The rest of the conversation goes the way these conversations always go. Slow. Pebbled with silences.
The guilt of being the one still here.
The dreams where they're alive, and you forget for a second when you wake up.
He tells me he envies people who lose someone slowly. Cancer, a long illness, the ones who get to say goodbye.
I don't tell him that my last moment with Thomas was an argument, a stupid one, that he leaned in for a kiss on his way out and I gave him my cheek. I don't tell him how many times I've gone back to that moment, or that I don't want the nightmares to leave, because at least I get to see him again.
After a while we run out of words and just sit in the silence. The yard goes on around us, kids shrieking, someone's Bluetooth speaker playing country music I don't recognize, Nate's lovely mother laughing across the patio. Life carrying on the way it always does.
My eyes drift across the lawn toward the pool.
He's there.
Asher. Standing at the edge with his back to me, both arms full of Owen, Nate's son. Owen is laughing hard from somewhere under his ribs as Asher hoists him up, holds him sideways like a log, and fake-staggers under the weight. The boys are loving it. Then he throws him into the pool.
Eli launches at him from the deck, and Asher catches him out of the air without looking, like he spends every weekend doing this.
He swings Eli around, ducks under him, and comes up with him riding his shoulders, Eli screaming with delight.
Owen climbs the pool ladder, reaching for his water gun, then drops back into the water and levels it at Asher's chest.
Asher lets him. He drops Eli an inch, lifting both hands in surrender, and takes the first stream square in the chest, the white cotton of his shirt going translucent in a long dark stripe. He yells something I can't make out. Eli is hanging off his elbow now, dead weight, laughing.
Then Asher gets a hand under Eli's middle and tosses him.
Not hard, a clean controlled arc that lands my son three feet out in the water with a splash that catches Owen full in the face.
Eli surfaces shrieking. Owen sputters and opens fire again, and Asher is laughing now, really laughing, head tipped back, shoulders shaking, the whole front of his shirt soaked through and plastered to his chest.
That's when he turns. He turns and finds me already watching.
His laugh doesn't stop. It just shifts.
The grin goes deliberate. Slow. Crooked at one corner in a way that isn't for the boys, isn't for the pool, isn't for anyone else in the yard.
It's for me.
I should look away.
But I don't.
I look one second too long, two, three, long enough that he sees me see him, and somewhere in those three seconds the wire behind my eye becomes a secondary problem.
I drop my gaze to my lap, heat climbing my throat.
"I think I need to step inside." I say it to Declan without quite looking at him. "The glare's getting to me. Sorry."
"Sure." He's already shifting. "Want me to..."
"No. No, please. Stay."
He nods. He doesn't say take care of yourself. Doesn't say it was nice meeting you. He just gives me one small, level look that means I'm glad we talked and turns his face back to the pool.
I get up too fast. The yard tilts, not much, just enough that I have to catch the back of the stool before my balance catches up. Then I move.
The patio door is open. I step through it into the sudden, blessed dim of Nate's kitchen, and the relief is so immediate I have to bite back a groan.
The blinds are pulled halfway. The AC is going.
The world inside is fifteen degrees cooler and ten shades darker, and my eye—the eye—eases one small notch.
I keep moving. Down the hallway, past the laundry, to the last door on the left. I close it behind me, locking it, and lean back against the wood for one slow breath.
The light in here is soft, a warm bulb, no windows. The mirror is small and round, and the toilet runs a little. I can hear it.
I use the bathroom. Wash my hands. The cool water on my wrists is its own small relief.
When I look up, I startle at my reflection.
The migraine is in there, sure. The half-squint, the tightness around my mouth, the flush on the high points of my cheeks from the heat. But underneath all of it, something else.
Color in my face that wasn't there this morning. A brightness in my eyes. My lips parted slightly the way they part when something catches me off guard.
I look alive.
I don't know when I last looked like a woman who has a body, who is in her body, who is using it for anything other than grieving and dragging herself out of bed.
I press my hands flat against the sink and feel the cool countertop beneath my palms.
Don't.
I won't think about him by the pool with my son on his shoulders. Or the way the wet shirt clung to his chest when Owen sprayed him. I won't think about that crooked grin. Deliberate. Slow. For me.
I'm thinking about all of it.
My pulse keeps finding its way into my throat, something I'd have called nervous in any other context. Here I'd have to call it something else, and I'm not going to.
I am a widow. I have two children managing the loss of their father in their own separate ways. I have a sister in my spare bedroom, a mother-in-law who still calls every Tuesday, and a migraine that has come and gone since the day Thomas died.
I have no business looking like this in a bathroom mirror.
I splash cool water on my forehead, press the back of my hand to my throat, then pat my hands dry on the little towel by the sink.
The woman in the mirror still looks flushed.
I take a breath and unlock the door. Turn the handle and pull it open.
He's coming up the hallway toward me. Five feet away. Then closer.
The white shirt is plastered to him across the chest, dark where the water has gathered at the hem.
He has a pool towel slung around his neck, half-heartedly drying his hair as he walks, and he's still grinning, the grin softened now into something easier, like he caught it from the boys and hasn't put it down yet.
"The boys got me," he says, like we're picking up a conversation that never paused.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
He stops two feet away. His eyes do a small, quick thing, dropping to my mouth and back up, the towel pausing on his hair.
"You okay, doll face?"
Doll face.
The nickname settles somewhere dangerous.
I meet his gaze, and the realization comes again.
I want him.
I lose myself in those blue-green eyes, and I don't think about it. I reach up, my hand closing around a fistful of wet t-shirt, and I pull, crashing my mouth into his.
For half a second, he doesn't move. Surprise flashes across his face, quick and bright, then it's gone, replaced by something else entirely, and he steps into me hard.
His mouth moves against mine.
He tastes like chlorine and salt and something underneath it that's just him. A low sound escapes him. His hand finds my waist and pulls me against him, and there's no hesitation in it. None at all.
I pull him further into me, walking us backward into the bathroom. We cross the threshold, and I swing the door shut behind him.
I find the lock.
I turn it.
The click is small.
The moment isn't.