Chapter Forty-Five
FORTY-FIVE
At some point, he’d fallen asleep. It was dreamless and uncomfortable, and he wouldn’t have even known it happened except that the light coming in from the window beat against his eyelids until he was forced to concede defeat and wake up.
His shoulder hurt. His wrists and hands were numb.
His jaw was throbbing like that time he needed a root canal.
But he was still alive, and Ginny had stopped crying.
Also, he needed to piss. Urgently. Very, very urgently—or what little remained of his dignity would simply wither away and evaporate.
“Dad?” Lex’s muffled voice called out from the restaurant. “Dad, are you dead? Because if you are, I’m going to kill you!”
“Lex?” Shepherd tried to sit up, immediately hit the bonds of his ties, and winced as his neck seized. His hands and feet burned with pin-and-needle pokes. “Lex!”
The kitchen doors slammed open.
“Dad!” Lex said. At the same time, Oscar gasped and shouted, “Shepherd? Shepherd’s girlfriend? I’m sorry, ma’am, I forgot your name.”
“Ginny!” Lex shouted. “Oh my God, what the hell?”
“Alexis,” both Shepherd and Oscar warned as one.
“We got robbed,” Ginny said. Shepherd couldn’t see what was happening. It was the first time he’d heard her speak since Charlie left them, and it was annoying how the sadness in her voice still made him want to punch Death in the throat.
Lex groaned. “You got robbed? That is so embarrassing for me.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Shepherd replied, his need to pee flooding his brain with dangerous levels of sarcasm. “I’m so sorry me being robbed is embarrassing for you!”
“What am I supposed to tell people, huh? That my dad and his girlfriend got tied up like birthday pinatas? That’ll win me lots of friends at Saltwater Scouts.”
“Hold on, hold on.” Oscar’s foot snagged on a chair leg, shoving Shepherd’s face harder into the tile floor.
Shepherd hissed in pain.
“I can help.” Oscar tried to stick his fingers between the rope and Shepherd’s ribs. Failed to do anything except turn Shepherd’s hiss of pain into a snort of suppressed ticklish laughter. “I’m the best locksmith in the county.”
“These aren’t locks,” Shepherd snapped. “They’re ropes.”
“Same basic principle.”
“Just get a knife!”
Lex clapped and whooped. “Yes, knife! Coming right up!”
“No!” shouted Shepherd, Oscar, and Ginny at the same time.
Lex grumbled. “The disrespect in this place, I swear.”
Oscar, trying to untie Shepherd, made the bind around his chest tighter.
Shepherd winced, swore, tried to yell at his former best friend over his shoulder, which only made everything hurt worse.
Including his bladder. He was going to pee his pants in front of his daughter, the man who had stolen his wife, and his fake fiancée. “Get the damn knife, Oscar!”
“Jeez, OK.” Shepherd heard him stand. “I see where you get your vocabulary from, Lex.”
“Thank you,” Lex replied. “The knives are right here, Oscar, I’ll just—”
Once again, all three adults shouted out, “No!”
Lex swore.
Shepherd had to pee too bad to care.
“So,” Oscar asked, once more behind Shepherd. The ropes pulled as the knife slipped between them and his back. “You gonna tell us, like … what the robbery was about? Did they take your money?”
“They didn’t take your phone,” Lex announced. “Because I was tracking it, and it never left the restaurant. And also, you never called me back! Which is so rude. I need my snorkel gear for Saltwater Scouts. Today we’re dissecting a squid, Dad. A squid!”
“I don’t know what snorkel gear has to do with squid dissection,” Ginny said. “Unless you’re dissecting it under water?”
“They are two unrelated activities,” Lex said. “You’re old, so you wouldn’t understand.”
The binds slipped loose. Shepherd, shakily, moved to his knees, his bound hands held up for Oscar like a stained-glass image of a praying monk. Lex was looking over Ginny’s ropes with interest, while Ginny was staring at his daughter’s face with something remarkably close to fondness.
“I’m younger than your dad,” Ginny said.
“Everyone is younger than my dad,” Lex replied. “He’s literally the oldest person I know.”
Shepherd’s wrists were free. He was on his half-numb feet in seconds, sprinting on his old legs to the bathroom, shouting behind him, “I’m only forty-two!”
When he returned to the kitchen, Ginny was free, Lex was gone, and Oscar was eating shredded cheese straight out of the bag.
Shepherd snatched the plastic bag out of Oscar’s hands. “Thank you for rescuing us. Now, get out.”
Oscar, his cheeks puffed with cheese, furrowed his brows. “Hey, man!” he said, except it sounded like “Wwwha wwwham!”
Lex sauntered into the kitchen with her dive bag slung over her shoulder. “Dad, don’t be mean to Oscar when he’s eating cheese. He can only handle one thing at a time! You know that.”
Shepherd deflated, but only slightly. There was still pressure in his chest, anger gurgling in his stomach, and it needed to go somewhere. Just, probably, not in front of his child. “Fine.” He handed Oscar the cheese back. “All yours.”
“Thank you,” Lex said. “Now, hurry up and eat it or I’m going to be late for Saltwater Scouts.”
Oscar gave her a thumbs-up and kept eating.
Ginny cleared her throat. “Thank you again. Both of you. But I … I have to go. Shepherd? I’m sorry.”
Shepherd turned. Shoved his hands in his pockets. Looked at her face. Took his hands out of his pockets. Stared at the spot on the wall to the right of her head. “Yeah, well. Sh—stuff happens.”
Her teeth dug into her bottom lip. For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was Oscar shoving cheese into his mouth.
“I’m going to get an Uber and go back to my parents’ house and see if I can do anything to save my mom before it’s too late.”
Shepherd nodded, once. Acknowledging he heard her. Refusing to go deeper than that.
“Thank you for everything you did for me, Shepherd. I–I can’t ever make it up to you.”
He shrugged, put his hands back in his pockets.
Kept staring at the wall. Why did he seem to grow more hands whenever Ginny was around?
Just keep looking at the wall, idiot. Don’t look at her eyes.
Don’t look at her perfect ice-blue eyes, or you’ll fall back into the hole, and this time it’ll be your grave.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Ginny tucked her hair behind her ear—her vibrant red hair, her dainty ear. He didn’t care. He didn’t look at it directly. He just stood there with his too many hands and waited.
“I’ll, um, I’ll check in later, OK? I’m sorry about missing so much work. If you need to hire someone else, I understand.”
He nodded again, another acknowledgment. Someone else would probably be the correct choice.
“Bye, Shepherd. Bye, Lex. Bye, Lex’s stepdad.”
Oscar swallowed. “See ya around, Shepherd’s girlfriend.”
Ginny left, the kitchen door swinging shut on the biggest headache Shepherd had ever encountered in human form in his lifetime. He took a deep breath, pulled his hands back out of his pockets. They were shaking.
Lex came up in front of him, arms crossed, head shaking. “You big dumb dad.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” She poked him in the chest. “You’re a big dumb dad. You just let her leave like that?”
“Alexis,” Shepherd warned. “The last few days have been the worst of my life, and she is the reason.”
She wiggled her snorkel bag at him. “Dad! You’re being so stupid right now!”
“I’m … what? Lex, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You think because I’m nine, I’m blind? No, Dad, I have eyes—unfortunately for both of us! Ginny likes you. Like likes you! And I don’t know why, but I do know she looks at you like you’re some sort of hero, and it’s disgusting.”
He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “Ginny doesn’t like me. She needed me. You’ll understand the difference when you’re older.”
Lex threw her bag down, her flippers thumping hard against the ground. “Oh my God, Dad! Are you hearing yourself? You think every time someone is nice to you, it’s some sort of scam? Jeez! I know Mom is mean to you, but God, get yourself together, man!”
Oscar, still holding the bag of cheese—though it was significantly emptier—nodded solemnly. “She’s right, dude. Maybe you’ve just … never had a woman appreciate you before?”
Shepherd glared at him. Tiredly, but angrily. He did not need the man who took his wife giving him advice about women. “She manipulated me, Oscar, so that I would help save her kidnapped mother. If you must know.”
Oscar’s chewing took on a contemplative quality. “Maybe she wasn’t manipulating you, though? What if she was just, you know, grateful? For everything you did? Maybe she actually likes you, and you’re too busy being grumpy to realize it?”
Shepherd’s glare disappeared. He tried, hard, to force it back.
“She looked like she’d been crying all night, Dad,” Lex said.
Shepherd rubbed the back of his neck. “That was … that was about her mom. Not me.”
Lex groaned so hard it was almost a growl.
“Dad, you are the dumbest smart person I know. Ginny likes you, she appreciates you, she trusts you. You went on an adventure together that, sure, clearly didn’t end well.
” She gestured to the overturned chairs and the cut pieces of rope.
“But you’re just gonna—what? Throw that all away and be alone again?
Because I am getting too old to keep hanging out with you.
Plus, you’ll spend the next ten years moping about Ginny, and you know it. ”
“She’s right,” Oscar said, before tipping the bag into his mouth. “You’ll be unbearable.”
Lex grabbed her dive bag and slung it over her shoulder.
“So, here’s the plan, Dad. I know you love plans so much.
You’re going to get in your car and you’re going to go to Ginny’s house and you’re going to get yourself together and be her boyfriend.
And Oscar is going to throw away that bag of cheese, wash his hands, and take me to Saltwater Scouts.
If I get there early enough, I get to pick my own squid. ”
Shepherd opened his mouth to argue, but Lex’s look forced it to close.
“What do you say, Dad?”
Shepherd sighed, dug his knuckles into his forehead. But his hands had stopped shaking. “Yeah. You’re—yeah. OK. You, uh, you really think she likes me?”
“Yes. And it’s gross. But if I’m not the Ring Bearer slash DJ at your wedding, I’ll riot.”