Chapter 5 #2
It might be — it might be a hundred things.
It might be the way he says good morning to Della without looking at her, gruffly, like he is angry, the way he has greeted Della every morning for twenty years that means I love you, woman, do not ask me to say it.
It might be the way he sits across from me at breakfast and pretends not to notice that I have not been sleeping.
It might be the way he says my name now — Willa, low, even, not the way he said it the first night in his office, but a softer version, an I-know-you-are-in-the-room version, that he does not say to anyone else.
It is all of those things. It is not any one of them.
By the eighteenth night I am ready to ask.
Callum is at the clubhouse with the younger wolves at a bonfire — a thing they do every Tuesday, a kind of pack hangout that is technically supervised and mostly is — and Della has retreated to her own cabin for the night, and the kitchen is mine, and Kael is at the table.
He is reading something for the club. He has glasses now, in the evenings, when he reads — small wire ones I had not noticed until tonight that he keeps in a case in his coat pocket — and the glasses are doing something to my chest that I do not have permission to feel.
I am at the stove. I am cooking, because cooking is what my hands do when my mind cannot.
I say, "Tell me about his last day."
Kael looks up.
He closes the ledger. He takes the glasses off. He folds them slowly into the case and he puts the case on the table beside the ledger and he sets his hands flat on the wood.
He says, "Are you sure."
"Yes."
"You don't have to."
"I do, Kael. I have to. I've been carrying a shape of it for seventeen years, a shape I made up out of what I could imagine. I need the real one. I need to put the real one in the same place where the shape has been, and I need to know if they fit."
He breathes in. He breathes out.
He says, "Sit down."
I sit down.
He tells me.
He tells me the morning — Ronan came in late, which was unusual, his eyes wouldn't meet anybody's.
He tells me the call from Conrad — they had received word from a contact inside the Blackthorn Reapers, photos of Ronan at a meet, dates, names, the gambling debt traced through three accounts.
He tells me the vote — every man at the table, eleven men, eleven yeses, no dissent.
He tells me Ronan was given the chance to speak and Ronan did not deny it.
I did it, he said. I did it because I owed the money and I was going to lose Willa over it and I couldn't lose Willa.
He tells me Ronan asked for one favor. Let Kael do it.
Don't make him hear about it from somebody else.
He's my brother. Let him be the one. And Conrad said yes.
And Ronan looked at Kael and said, I'm sorry, brother.
I am sorry, and Kael said nothing because there was nothing to say.
He tells me the drive. He tells me the dirt road.
He tells me they walked twenty feet from the truck and Ronan stopped of his own accord and said, here is fine, and turned around.
He tells me Ronan said: tell her I loved her.
Tell her it was always her. Tell her the baby — I think she's pregnant, Kael, she doesn't know yet, but I think she is.
Tell her I'm sorry I won't be there. Tell her name the kid whatever she wants.
I am not crying. I am not — I have not — I have been still since he started.
Kael tells me what Ronan said next.
Tell her I'm not afraid. Tell her I'm not afraid because you're going to do it and you're going to do it right and I trust you to do it right, brother, more than anyone in the world. I love you. I forgive you. I love you. Do it now.
He tells me he did it.
He tells me he buried him by hand. Six hours.
Stones over the top. He tells me he did not sleep that night or for the next eight nights.
He tells me he came back to the compound and saw me standing on the porch and he could not, he could not, he could not make himself walk over to me, and so he stood and watched me leave, and he has thought about that moment every day for seventeen years.
He tells me the rest. Quietly. Plainly. The way Priest told him about his life.
When he is done, I am standing at the stove.
I am holding a wooden spoon.
I have not stirred the pot in five minutes.
My face is wet.
My hands are not shaking. My hands are very steady.
Some piece of me has gone — gone somewhere quiet, somewhere far back — and the piece of me that is in the kitchen is doing the work of being upright and listening, and the piece that is far back is unfolding the seventeen-year-old shape of his last day and laying it down beside the real shape Kael has just given me, and the two shapes are not the same shape, and the real one is so much smaller and so much harder and so much kinder than the one I made up, and my husband — my husband — loved him.
My husband forgave him. My husband, on the last day of his life, with the gun already in Kael's hand, said I love you. I forgive you.
For seventeen years I have been carrying a man who died screaming.
The man Kael has just given me died saying I forgive you.
I set down the spoon.
I cross the kitchen.
I do not — I do not plan it. My body does it. My body walks across the kitchen and around the table and to where Kael is sitting in the chair with his hands flat on the wood and his face turned toward me, and I do not stop, I do not slow down, I put my arms around him.
He goes rigid.
He has not — I think he has not been touched, properly, by anyone in seventeen years.
I think the only hands that have been on his skin in seventeen years have been hands in fights and hands at handshakes and a doctor's hands at one stitching and Della's hand once a year on his shoulder at supper.
He has not been held. He has not been touched the way I am touching him now, with both arms and the full press of my chest and my face down against the top of his head, and his body does not — does not — know what to do.
For maybe four seconds he stays rigid.
Then he breaks.
He makes a sound. It is not a sob. It is something underneath sob, something a man makes when the wall he has spent seventeen years building comes down all at once and he is standing in the rubble.
His arms come up. His arms wrap around my waist. His face turns into my stomach and he holds onto me the way Callum held onto me at the kitchen floor in Maine — with the full involuntary weight of a body that has been holding something up for too long and has just been told it can put the weight down.
He shakes.
I hold him.