Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
Griffin
She falls asleep somewhere around the second hour.
One minute she’s got her feet up on the dash, talking about the watercolor she bought and how she wants to frame it when she gets home, and the next time I glance over, she’s gone.
I turn the music down.
I’ve been thinking about the music shop.
I’ve been thinking about it since it happened. I’d walked past the window and heard the violin before I understood what I was hearing. And when I pushed the door open and saw her?
She didn’t know I was there… Christ.
She was completely lost in it, eyes closed.
I stood there like an idiot in the doorway, holding shopping bags, and I thought: There she is.
I see the turnout about a mile ahead. It’s a wide gravel shoulder where the cliff pushes out into a point.
The car crunches to a stop.
I sit for a second, looking at what’s in front of us. The coast stretches south, headland after headland fading into haze.
It’s a view worth waking someone up for.
I reach over and put my hand on her shoulder. “Pipes.”
She stirs and makes a sound.
“Piper.”
She opens her eyes and blinks away the fog of sleep as she looks at the windshield. “Where are we?”
“Don’t know exactly.” I nod toward the window. “But look.”
When she turns her head, her eyes widen. “Oh, it’s beautiful.”
I’m not looking at the view. I’m looking at her when I say, “Yeah, it is.”
She’s sitting up now, properly awake, staring at the coastline like she’s trying to commit it all to memory.
“Come on,” I tell her, nodding toward a low barrier at the edge of the gravel. We sit on it, legs hanging. The drop below us is steep enough to matter and far enough away that it’s just scenery. The wind is wild, and it blows her hair around her face.
She hasn’t styled her hair since she left the church, and it’s falling in its natural waves. It suits her.
“How long was I asleep?” she asks.
“An hour and a half, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You needed it.”
She leans back on her hands and looks at the water. “I had a dream about the county fair.”
“Gerald?”
“He could talk in the dream. He had opinions.”
“About what?”
“Everything, weirdly. He was very confident.” She tilts her face toward the light. “You were there, and you kept winning things.”
“Naturally,” I say.
“You won a second penguin, and you were trying to decide what to name it. You kept asking me, and I kept saying I didn’t know. You got very stressed about it.”
“That sounds like me.”
“It does, right? Even dream-you is very invested in things being named correctly.”
“Things should be named correctly.”
“Gerald Two was your frontrunner.”
I laugh under my breath. “That’s fucking terrible.”
I peer up at the clouds that have been building to the south for the last forty minutes. They’ve moved faster than I calculated. The sky is dark gray and looks angry.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You know you can.”
“The Meridian bridge. When it’s done, what does it look like?”
I think about it. “Cable-stayed. Two pylons coming up on either side, with the main span about three hundred meters. The cables fan out from the tower heads, and from a distance it looks like—do you know what a harp looks like from the side?”
She turns toward me and nods.
“It’ll look like two harps, facing each other across the river.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “You didn’t tell me that part before.”
“The harp part?”
“You told me about the engineering.” She’s looking at me with that expression. “You didn’t tell me it would look like two harps.”
I look at the water. “Dom laughed at me when I told him. In the first design meeting, I said I wanted it to look like two harps, and he laughed. Then he said, ‘Okay, let’s build that.’”
“He’s a good partner.”
“He is.”
“Griffin?” She waits until I look at her. “Two harps facing each other across a river.” She shakes her head. “You’re going to leave something beautiful in the world.”
I look at her face. The light on it. The wind in her hair. My chest does something I’ve stopped trying to name.
“I might.”
She holds my gaze a moment longer, then the first drop hits my arm.
I look at the sky. The clouds have covered the gap faster than I expected. The leading edge is directly above us now.
A second drop.
Piper looks up. “Is that—”
“Yeah, we’re about to get hit. Run.”
“What?”
I’m up and grabbing her hand. “Run.”
The words are barely out of my mouth when the sky opens and rain pours down on us.