Campbell_Book One

Chapter 20




December 2002

Calgary, Campbell



Lucy pulled her coat around her and leaned against Cole in an attempt to hide from the wind, as Bull’s cousins tossed the barely thawed dirt over tiny Ruben’s body. Cara clutched Chloe, a year and a half, to her chest to Lucy’s left.

He’d been fine one day, with just a little cough. Two weeks later, he was dead. Three was too young to die.

Lucy squeezed her eyes shut to keep from weeping, as a girl she didn’t know sang Amazing Grace with a lot of the wrong words.

Cole wrapped his arm tightly around her shoulders. “You know how lucky we are?” he whispered in her ear as they headed into the church near the house Bull grew up in. “That we didn’t have anyone to lose?”

“And we didn’t lose each other?” Lucy whispered back. “I think about that a lot.”

“Sometimes, I think it’s Mom,” he whispered. “I think Mom did all of this.”

“So we could start again?” Lucy loved that so often their thoughts fit together perfectly. “Me too.”

When they were in Calgary, they stayed in a house across the street from the house Bull had taken over. It was a new build, barely lived in before its double-income, no-kids owners had kicked it over a year earlier.

Andrew left hours after they arrived, headed north to meet up with some girl he’d met in Edmonton earlier in the year. Lucy’s feelings about her older brother had been conflicted since his return. In a lot of ways, he was the same as he’d been before they’d been sent to live with their grandfather, but in others, he was a different person entirely. He was colder, more ruthless, and that, combined with his existing giving-no f*cks-attitude, scared Lucy and Cole at times.


“How long is he gone—”

“Couple of weeks, hopefully,” Lucy whispered to her brother.

“Good,” he nodded, exhaling loudly.

They talked about Andrew a lot, her and Cole, whispering late into the night when he’d fight someone on their porch, or a girl would leave their house, wide-eye and afraid. Neither twin was quite sure how to handle him, because their irritation with him was juxtaposed with gratitude for what he’d done for them in their earlier lives. The twins knew that the more they progressed, the harder it was going to be to control him. Andrew liked power. Still though, he was their brother and Lucy knew he’d kill for her, and that meant something.

Dinner was at Bull’s that night; a feast prepared by Paul and a couple of Bull’s schoolmates from a buck they’d brought down a few nights earlier.

Lucy had just tucked into a piece of Cara’s apple cake in the kitchen when she overheard a conversation in the living room that set the hair on her arms on end.

“What are you, some kind of faggot?” Thomas, one of Bull’s cousins, growled at her twin. “Don’t touch me like that.”

Bull’s head perked up too, and he nodded towards the doorway. “You want me to get that?” he asked her, his brows knitting together. “I thought it was fine—”

“What was fine?”

“Tommy and Cole. I thought they were...” he shook his head. “I’ll—”

“No,” Lucy said, shaking her head as her stomach churned. “He needs to figure things out on his own.”

The two of them inched closer to the living room, but remained out of sight.

“We were just talking,” Cole said, exasperated. “I don’t know why you think—”

“I heard about you,” Thomas barked. “I heard all about you. I’m not some f*cking faggot. I should kick your ass.”

Bull raised his eyebrows at Lucy, to see if she wanted him to intervene.

She shook her head and whispered, “Not yet.” This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Cole, while very different from Andrew, also enjoyed the newly acquired power his family had gained, and become bolder with his flirtations as a result. Usually Andrew was around to bail him out when things went south, as they almost always did, but Lucy knew that that wouldn’t always be the case. Unfortunately for him, Cole’s type seemed to be guys much bigger than him, who were either closeted, or firmly heterosexual.

Bull’s house was as safe a place for any for him to learn a hard lesson. The crack of Thomas’ fist against Cole’s face made Lucy wince, and before he could throw another, Bull tossed him out on his ass.

“I was just talking. We were just talking,” Cole gasped, reaching for his face.

“Right,” Lucy muttered. “There’s not always going to be someone there to bail you out, you know. You ‘talk’ to the wrong person like that and they’ll kill you.”

“I’m fine,” Cole grumbled, turning to Bull. “And I don’t need you to bail me out. I could have handled him.”

“In a fight, in my living room, on the day of my brother’s funeral?” Bull growled. “No.”

After the altercation, the mood was decidedly somber and when Lucy went to leave later that night, desperate to be away from all the sadness, Bull grabbed her hand.

“Please, don’t go,” he said, his voice low. “Stay with me. Both of you. Cole can take Ruben’s room.”

For a few months, she’d teetered between love and hate for her friend. He’d spent a lot of time trying to goad her into a romantic relationship over the summer, and they’d fought as a result over a series of stupid, inconsequential things that upset her to think about in the context of his brother dying.

This night, she did what was good and kind. She followed him up the stairs to his room.

“I’ll stay with you,” she whispered, crawling in beside her friend. “But I’m not—”

“F*ck, Goose. I just lost my brother. You think I’m interested in that?” He pulled her smaller body against his. His hands brushed over her chest, in a move that appeared to be accidental, perhaps because her chest was larger than it had been the last time they’d shared a bed. She’d gotten her period too, one awful morning a couple of months earlier, and found herself trudging into womanhood like she was on some sort of death march. None of the changes she was going through were enjoyable in the least.

Bull had changed in the last six months as well; lost every ounce of the baby fat Lucy knew he’d been self-conscious about. His voice had changed too, to a deep, rich tone that only cracked occasionally.

Despite their familiarity, Lucy knew no that matter how long she knew Bull, no matter what transpired between them in the future, she’d never feel as comfortable with him as she did with Cole because she’d never been able to properly decipher what he was thinking from what he was saying. With Cole, it was a given. Bull said one thing, but the way he held her, it suggested something else entirely. She knew he’d never hurt her, but she also knew he’d jump on any opportunity that presented itself when it came to pursing his attraction to her.

“I think it was my fault,” he whispered. “There was nothing I could do though. He just…he got sicker and sicker.”

“Then it wasn’t your fault, exactly,” Lucy replied, giving him a half smile in the dim light. “If you couldn’t prevent it.”

“He was such a good kid,” he choked. “Always did what I asked him.”

“We’ll learn how to help sick kids. We can learn,” Lucy whispered. “There’s books, and we’ll work hard. We’ll learn fast.”

“So it wasn’t all for nothing, he murmured. “It can’t be for nothing.”

Lucy nodded. “So it wasn’t all for nothing.”



October 2012

Los Angeles, West



Tal woke up to incessant banging on the front door of the house.

“Get that!” Leah groggily yelled, tugging him out of his half sleepy state. “It’s probably for you!”

Begrudgingly, Tal got up, pulled on some clothes and trudged down the stairs. On the other side of the door he found Connor, flanked by George and Rico, two huge guys that he paid to be his muscle.

He immediately regretted opening the door.

“We’re going to war with Vegas,” Connor stated, his voice wavering in a way Tal had never heard before. “Pack enough stuff for a week. Bring all your guns.”

Tal shook the sleep out of his head, curious as to if he was perhaps still asleep in a terrible dream.

“What?”

“They’re advancing. They’re on the offensive. They’ve moved into Old Arizona,” he replied rapidly. “We need to go and stop them before they go any further.”

Tal found himself not as concerned about that as he would have been a month earlier. “How do you intend to do that?”

“Tanks, guns, everything. We put them back in their place with everything we’ve got, or we’ll never—”

“I’m not going with you. I’m going to stay here,” Tal said quietly, but firmly. “I’m going to stay here, and maintain order, and continue to negotiate with Campbell—”

“F*ck Campbell,” Connor sneered.

That was all it took. All doubt Tal had regarding Connor’s guilt over his kidnapping and Juan’s murder was gone. Connor had never had any plan to work with Campbell when he’d sent Tal up there. He’d orchestrated it all to serve as a distraction.


“F*ck Campbell? F*ck Campbell?” Tal raised his voice, unable to stop his emotions from creeping in.

“They’re not going to come down and save our asses.”

Maybe not his ass, Tal smugly thought to himself. “They’re the best chance we’ve got. We don’t exactly have a lot of allies.”

A look was exchanged, and for the first time in many years, Connor backed down first.

“You stay here,” Connor said with a heavy nod. “I’ll be in touch for supplies.”

Tal locked the door behind them and slumped down against it.

Someone else knocked two minutes later. This time he checked the peephole and saw Rika standing there, kids in tow, her face flushed, presumably from hustling them over in the morning sun. He ushered them in and locked the door again.

“Vegas is getting supplies from East,” she spewed, exhaling loudly like she’d been holding it in. “I’ve been hiding in a bush waiting for Connor to leave.”

“With your kids?”

She smiled down at them, and picked a twig out of the littlest one’s hair. “Penny and Ana have done stranger things.”

“How did you find that out?”

“Mexican mafia.” She shrugged. “I called my hairdresser last night.”

“Your hairdresser?”

Her eyes twinkled. “She’s not a hairdresser. She just cuts my hair. She’s a...” Rika covered the littlest girl’s ears and mouthed the last part. “Prostitute.”

“Oh.”

“She’s got all the right clients.” Rika looked around Tal’s house. “I thought you’d be living larger.”

“This was my parent’s house.”

She nodded thoughtfully and her eyes gleamed as they met his. “How sentimental. So, this changes things, this thing with East, considering what we know about what’s happened with Campbell.”

Tal nodded in agreement and put his index finger to his mouth. “Leah’s upstairs.”

“Right,” she nodded. “And you don’t—“

He shrugged noncommittally. “Not sure. I haven’t told her everything. Let’s go to my office.”

It was odd, talking strategy with two of the best behaved small girls he’d ever seen in the room, but he and Rika did it as the two kids colored away happily with a box of stale crayons he’d remembered being in his father’s desk. He’d played with them himself when he was a kid and his dad would work from home.

“I think our plan is still a good one,” Rika said. “But we have to be prepared to either fight East, or make friends with them.”

“I’m not making friends with them, especially after what they did to Lucy’s brother. They’re nuts,” Tal muttered. “And I told Campbell we’d work with them.”

“So then we’ll have to be prepared to fight. It’ll all come down to Mexico.”

“Can we work with Mexico?”

She smiled at her kids. “I think so. We’re in a good spot with them.”

“I want us to be more like Campbell,” Tal said decisively. “I want a more even distribution of wealth.”

“It’s nice, in theory,” Rika said with a shrug and a smile. “A good thing to aspire towards.”

“Better than a capitalist dictatorship?”

She nodded, lowering her voice. “I’d say so. Tal, do you remember the internet?”

Tal nodded, trying to remember what was on the internet. “Kind of? People used to get music there, right? Napster? There used to be porn there too?”

“Yeah,” Rika nodded. “And games, and information. I think it would have been huge in a few years. I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure, but I called my friends in Silicon Valley because we’ve been building this thing, well, we’ve been working on rebuilding it, and they said they’d hold it.” Her eyes gleamed. “They’d hold it for us.”

“Hold it?”

“They’d let us release it. When we needed it. You think movies are big. This,” she shook her head. “It’ll change everything. We’ve got all the software, and the Chinese—”

“Can build the hardware,” he nodded along. “And we could have that again.”

“Better than before. And once it starts, it just builds itself. The possibilities are endless. It solves any communication barriers we’ve had with the world. Email, Tal. We can email.”

“From a computer?”

“It won’t just be for typing. There’s voice technology. It’ll be a phone too. We’ve been working on all this for a long time.”

“I didn’t know.”

She smiled slyly. “That’s because we didn’t want you to know, because you would have taken it.”

“And now?” he asked curiously. “They don’t think that now?”

“I’m your second,” she said with a loopy shrug that warmed Tal’s heart unexpectedly. “So what’s mine is yours.”

Tal smiled at her assumption, although he knew he’d probably be just as happy being her second. “Juan knew about all this?”

She bit her lip as a fat tear rolled down her cheek. “Juan and I had a plan. It would have been a few years before we made a move. Why do you think he stayed so close to Connor?”

“With the Mexico connection and the tech—”

“We would have flattened you, and you never would have seen it coming.”

Tal gave her a half-smile. “But you trust me now.”

“I have to trust someone, and Juan was okay with you. He said you were in the same situation as him, but with no plan. Stuck. It’s hard to change unless—”

“You can imagine a better outcome.”

She glanced at her girls. “I don’t want them to live in a world where they’re not capable of rising to the top if that’s what they decide they want.”

Tal smiled at them. “They do colour in the lines very well.”

She smiled. “Juan and me, we decided a long time ago that we were going to do this right. It’s more important than ever that I do that, which is why I’m willing to trust you. You didn’t have to tell me that you thought Connor was responsible for what happened.”

“Of course I did,” he replied. “That, and I didn’t have anyone else to tell.”

They smiled at each other understandingly. “If we’re dealing with East, we need Campbell on side.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Let me work on that.”

Tal called the Campbell house again around two, when Rika took the kids home and Leah went out somewhere, loudly slamming the door behind her. It rang for ages before anyone answered. He decided he wasn’t taking no for an answer when it came to talking to Lucy. He’d give his condolences and hope that what he’d passed onto Bull, combined with what he’d found out about East would be enough to keep her on the line.

“Hello?” A vaguely familiar female voice answered brightly.

“I’m calling for Lucy. It’s important.”

“Who is this?” the voice said curiously.

“Who is this?” Tal countered.

“Cara,” she replied cautiously. “And you are…?”

“It’s Tal. From…your house,” he said, shaking his head at his own awkwardness as he pictured the strawberry blonde woman with the large ass. “I need to talk to Lucy…or Bull. There are some new developments.”


“Bull left this morning for Seattle, and Lucy, well, she’s not really talking. Period.”

“Oh,” Tal said. “That’s—”

A door slammed and Cara’s voice dropped. “What did you find out? More about Connor?”

Tal noted that she’d conferred with Bull. “East is supplying Vegas with weapons. They moved into Old Arizona this morning.”

The line went quiet. “You have to come here and tell her that you need her.”

“Go there? I can’t—”

“Yeah,” she replied seriously. “She needs a push, or the only Campbell anyone is going to remember will be her brother, the one that’s terrorizing everything east of us. We’re not getting through to her. She’s…stuck.”

Tal knew what stuck was. Stuck had landed him on a bridge, years earlier. He also knew he was irrationally attached to Lucy, and right now, that was not good.

“I don’t think I can come—”

“Well, if you want to work with her, you’ll figure out a way.”

“Is she…okay?” he asked carefully.

“No,” Cara said simply. “She’s not.”

Tal paced for hours, trying to determine the right course of action. Leaving wasn’t smart, then again, neither was staying if it meant he didn’t have strong support from Campbell, or worse, had to negotiate with the wrong Campbell. Rarely an opportunist, he saw a chance to endear himself to Lucy, to affect her in some way the way she’d affected him in their time together. He knew he wasn’t extraordinary like she was, but he did know a thing or two about loss and blame.

“You sure you don’t just want to move in?” Rika said brightly as he stood on her doorstep. “Really get people talking?”

“I need to go to Campbell.” Tal frowned. “Everything is falling apart there.”

“And you think you can help?” Rika wrinkled up her nose. “Really? Now?”

“I hope so,” Tal said honestly. “She’s…I think she’s important. To us, with this.”

Rika moved aside and let him in a knowing smile on her face. “I can get you a plane, but what about her friend who’s coming down?”

“Can you…?” Tal sat on the couch and shook his head. “I can try and be back by then. He won’t be here for a week.”

“Okay,” Rika nodded. “I’ll see what else I can find out about what happened to you and,” she swallowed. “Juan. I want to know who killed Juan.”

Tal wrapped her up in his arms, remembering Lucy’s attack. “I killed him already. In Missouri.”

“Oh,” she rasped. “You did?”

“With a tire iron. It was as awful a death as you could imagine. Not quick, and—”

“That shouldn’t make me feel better,” she said thoughtfully. “But it does.”

Rika made a call to Otis, the kid that taught Juan how to fly, and four hours later, after packing and threatening Leah with everything he could think of until she agreed to cover for him for the week, Tal boarded a plane to Campbell. At the last minute, he’d thrown something in that he thought might help, no matter how hard it was for him to look at.

The last family album his mother had put together.

The flight went by quickly, and Tal passed the time thinking about how interesting it was that people liked Rika as much as they did, for such a wide variety of reasons. Otis, with his blond hair and dark rimmed glasses, was certainly not related to her or her late spouse in any way, but apparently owed her some debt after she was able to source him a rare plane part from China for his baby, which Tal had the privilege of flying in.

It was well after dark when they landed in Campbell, and just as the last time, their greeting was not pleasant. A few bruises and two damaged egos later, they were deposited on the Campbell’s porch, which was flanked by a couple of kids about Bull’s size.

“Cara asked me to come,” Tal grimaced. “Is she here?”

The two boys looked at each other and one went inside. A few minutes later, Cara emerged in an apron, covered in flour.

“You move quickly,” she said with a grin. “Sorry your welcome wasn’t more…welcoming. I would have put the word out if I’d known when you were arriving.”

Otis grumbled something about barbarians north of the forty-ninth parallel.

Tal rubbed his very bruised arm. “We’re at war with Vegas, so we didn’t have much time to waste. Is Zoey going to come out here and kick my ass for good measure?”

Cara shook her head. “No Zoey. She and Bull left for Seattle this morning.”

The two exchanged a look that confused Tal. “Why did Zoey—”

“She wasn’t needed here,” Cara replied in a way that left her meaning curiously open for interpretation. “Bull opted not to tell Lucy about what you’d discovered until you had more proof, but I thought that was a mistake.”

“So if I tell her, it’ll put me at odds with Bull.”

“If Lucy had less on her mind, and you hadn’t ended up in the mix, she would have figured it out.” She moved aside and let them in. “I’m making pie. There’s roast in the oven.”

Otis responded with a nod and a grin. “Things are looking up then.”

Cara stopped Tal as they walked into the kitchen.

“Why don’t you go see her,” she said gently. “I think she just needs something else to think about for a while. Tell her about your problems. Make her feel important.”

“I’m not sure why you think—”

She cut him off with a shake of her head. “I don’t think anything. I feel like we’re running out of options.”

“She’s—”

“In her room.”

Tal reached for his bag. “Where’s that?”

Cara chuckled, either at his eagerness or his lack of knowledge, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her. “Upstairs, third door on the left.”

The staircase creaked, and as Tal walked down the hallway, he peered into a door that was open a crack. He knew in a second that it was Cole’s, because there was something about it that looked like Lucy. The organized piles, the crisp blue he’d chosen to paint the walls. He continued on, paused, and counted the doors to make sure he had the third door, and before he gave a gentle knock.

There was no reply.

He eased it open, hoping she didn’t have a knife or a gun, or a gun with a knife attached to it, hidden in her bed.

“Lucy?” he said carefully, looking around the large bedroom before his eyes settled on the blanketed lump in the bed. “It’s Tal. From West.”

Still nothing.

He eased around the bed carefully, after deciding she was facing right. When he knelt down beside where he hoped her face was, he noticed the piles of hair around her bed, long and dark.

“Lucy,” he whispered, as her sad eyes came into view. “Hey.”

Her long hair was gone, replaced with a patchy cut cropped close to her head, and her lips were cracked and chapped. She looked eerily like her brother. Tal wondered if that was what she was going for, or if she’d cut her hair at some breaking point.

“I don’t know why you came,” she muttered, rolling away from him.

Tal found himself angry with Bull for not telling her about his suspicions involving Connor, but as he stood there, he wasn’t sure that was on top of the priority list, given what happened. It was just a theory; their war with East was very real.


“East is sponsoring Old Nevada in a war against West. Connor’s fighting with them over Old Arizona right now. They armed their border.”

She rolled onto her back. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Tal muttered. “I’m sorry about your brother, but—”

“I’m done. I’m done with all of this.” She rolled back on her side away from him so he couldn’t see her face.

“So he died for nothing then. Great.” Tal shook his head impatiently. “Have a nice life, Lucy Campbell,” he grumbled as he slammed her door.

He stopped at the door to Cole’s room and pushed it open. The bed was unmade. A picture that sat on the dresser of the two of them from when they were maybe four or five caught Tal’s attention, and he examined it. Cole’s arm was around Lucy and she was grinning up at him, her front teeth missing. If it hadn’t been for the pink and blue t-shirts, it would have been very hard to tell them apart.

Maybe he’d hardened up, the older he got. Maybe desperate times called for putting reason and emotion aside for a while. Maybe he was mad at himself for seeing Lucy as someone worth aspiring to be like when really, she was no stronger than him. Regardless, she’d encouraged Tal to move on a plan that had been a far off dream wasting away in the back of his mind for almost ten years.

He wasn’t ready to stop believing in her yet.

When he walked back into her room, she’d returned to her fetal position, facing away from the door. All his anger at Connor’s betrayal and at her inactivity floated to the surface, and he let her have it.

“You’re going to let more people die because you’re done. Good to see you’re no better than my friend who you were so quick to write off as a dictator. At least he’s not laying around in bed while everything goes to—”

“You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like to be responsible—” A haggard sob escaped her throat.

Tal shook his head. “I know exactly what it’s like to be responsible. You have your minutes, days of wallowing in the shit you made, and then you move on, because people need you.”

“Nobody—”

“I need you. Everyone needs you. Now you can be this mess of a person you seem to need to be when you close your door at night, but your actions are affecting others and you are more than your mistakes.”

She sat up and looked at him curiously. “You think you can come in here and talk to me like that?”

“Talk to who? You said you’re done. You’re just some bitch who had a good idea once.”

She blinked at him, and made a sound that could have been laughing or crying.

“You’re mean when you want to be,” she chortled. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“And I didn’t think you had this in you.” He nodded at the bed. “Lucy—”

“I know, I know,” she muttered, pulling the blankets around her. “I just…I need a little time.”

“You don’t have a little time,” Tal said, more gently than before. “It doesn’t work like that sometimes.”

“Why did you come here?” she looked at him, her grey eyes boring into his.

“Because I wanted to try and affect you in a fraction of the way you’ve affected me.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “I need some time,” she mumbled.

“You don’t have—”

She put her hand up and shushed him in a very real Lucy kind of way. “Tomorrow. I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

“I can’t stay long. You better,” Tal said with a half grin, as he headed to the door. “You look like shit.”

“I don’t think I’ve looked not like shit since we met, have I?”

Tal shook his head thoughtfully. “You looked fine the first time.”

After Cara made sure he and Otis were fed well enough that they weren’t going anywhere, even if they’d wanted to, Tal settled into the basement room he’d slept in when he’d been there a couple of weeks earlier. Cara had taken Lucy’s dinner up to her and stayed there for a while, reappearing to give sleeping designations. Because Otis was with Tal, he was allowed to sleep in the house, on the fold-out couch in the basement. Tal hadn’t put two and two together before but that night he realized that you had to be in the good books in Campbell to stay inside.

He’d just turned off the lamp when the door to his room opened and Cara let herself in.

“She says you can sleep in Cole’s room if you want. Give your pilot this bed.”

“I don’t know….”

“It’s clean. I just made it up with new sheets. If she’s offering I think you should take it.”

“Where’s Paul?” Tal thought to ask.

“He’s in Montana taking care of the kids. We couldn’t both get away.” She sat on the edge of his bed. “I knew someone else had to step in. We’re all hurting over Cole, and it’s hard for any of us to tell it like it is.”

“I just told her about Vegas and East. Not the rest.”

“You will though. And then you and her will figure out what to do about it. Go upstairs.” She stood up. “Consider it a very high compliment.”

Tal grabbed his shirt and his bag, and after giving Otis the good news that he’d been upgraded to a real bed, he followed Cara upstairs, and she ducked into what he assumed was her regular room, across the hall from Lucy. He wondered what the hierarchy was with sleeping arrangements, or if there even was one.

He was shocked when Lucy, hair damp, in a very heavy pair of flannel pyjamas crawled in beside him a few hours after he’d fallen asleep.

Questions swirled in his mind about her sleepwalking, and even went so far as to question if she’d lost her mind and if he wasn’t the only one that had had the poor judgment to keep it in the family. She didn’t touch him though, instead wrapping her arms around an extra pillow as she curled up facing away from him.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“What I’ve been fighting with myself about doing since I heard you come up the stairs a few hours ago. Just go back to sleep.”

“I’m not your brother, and I don’t want to be—”

“My brother never would have talked to me the way you did.” She flicked on the lamp and her grey eyes searched his face. “Maybe he should have.”

His arm moved almost of its own accord and settled on her waist as she pushed closer to him.

“I have so much to tell you,” he whispered, thinking of all the things that happened since they’d parted.

She shook her head. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I want to pretend it was a skiing accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s three weeks after your oldest brother’s wedding, and Cole…” She reached over and turned off the lamp as her voice cracked. “It was a ski accident. At Whistler.”

Tal’s mouth twitched in the dark and his mind raced as he started to understand what Lucy saw in him.

Something apart from everything else.