“I didn’t know you did.” Shaking, she put down the chair leg and dusted her hands off on the seat of her jeans. She thought about sitting—her knees were knocking enough to make her unsteady—but she didn’t want to with him there. What she did there in the equipment shed was private. She didn’t want to share.
“I was just passing. I don’t always stop in here. But I like to go look out at the water on days like this.” Ilya cleared his throat.
Alicia had always known she was not the only person who’d lost Jennilynn. Her parents didn’t talk about it, but here was someone who might understand at least the smallest part of what she felt. Ilya loved her sister, too.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “If that’s all right.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Sure. Okay.”
“Haven’t seen you around.” She let him lead so he could bend the branches out of the way to clear a path. “I heard Niko was working in Antarctica.”
She hadn’t heard it from Niko. Galina had told her one day when Alicia came out to get the mail. Waiting for a letter that never came.
Ilya glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah, yeah.”
“How’s Galina taking that?”
He laughed. “She’s fine. Babulya is worried he’s going to freeze to death. We all tried to tell her they don’t live in igloos or whatever, but you know her.”
“Right.” They crunched along without talking for a few more minutes until the trees and brush began to thin and they reached the chain-link fence.
“How’s school?” He gave her a sideways glance.
“Fine.” Two years, business degree. She hadn’t had to leave home and, better than that, hadn’t needed to think hard about what she wanted to do or be. She would graduate in a few months, though. Then she’d have to figure out what she wanted to do. “Are you still working at the warehouse?”
“Yeah. Good money. Shitty hours.”
On the other side of the fence, they both headed in the same direction. Not toward the old rope swing and the outcropping of rocks where they’d spent so many summer days swimming. The other way, toward the quarry’s steep drop-off.
Together, they walked toward the place where Jennilynn’s body had been found.
There was no marker or memorial, nothing even like people sometimes put at spots along the highway to show where a fatal accident had occurred. The bushes that had been broken to show the place where Jenni had fallen had long ago grown back. The rocks beneath covered with water after the last few weeks of rain.
“I always think there will be . . . blood.” Ilya looked out, out, across the water to the high stone walls on the other side of the quarry.
Alicia shivered. “There wasn’t any blood, not even when they found her. It had all washed away.”
Ilya scuffed the dirt, kicking pebbles over the edge. Alicia listened but couldn’t hear the splash. She didn’t want to get any closer. Didn’t want to take the risk of slipping over and falling. She’d dreamed, a few times, of jumping. But she didn’t want to fall.
“Hey, look.” Ilya pointed at the broad white sign with red letters set up on the quarry’s other, higher, side. It was the size of a billboard. “It’s for sale.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ilya had finally made it in to work.
He’d shown up in ample time to handle the in-water classes at the VA, which was where he would spend his morning and most of the afternoon. He’d also given Alicia all the updates about the trip to Jamaica that was due to leave the following week—a trip she’d been on the verge of canceling, even though it would’ve meant losing all their deposits.
She had not yet spoken to him about the offer from Theresa. The thick packet of papers was on her desk in the plain white envelope. She hadn’t looked at it again since the meeting with Theresa earlier. She didn’t need to. The numbers inside it were burned into her mind enough so that all she had to do was go to her computer files and run some reports on what Go Deep owed and had earned over the past few years, and was likely to earn in the next few.
The truth was, no matter what she and Ilya might want, no matter how hard—or not—each of them worked, the shop wasn’t making money. It wasn’t going to make money. It was always going to hover on the bare brink of bankruptcy, especially if Ilya, as he was certainly wont to do, intended to keep seeking out bigger and more extravagant items to sink into the quarry’s chilly, spring-fed depths so that the few people who did visit it for local dives could be entertained.
Maybe, she thought, it was time to let it go.
All of it.
And then what? For the first time in a couple of decades, she allowed herself to contemplate what she could do or where she could go. What did she even want? What had she ever wanted?
She didn’t know and really never had. Oh, in high school she’d thought here and there about being a teacher or a nurse or working in human resources, idle considerations based on the results of standardized career-placement tests. None of that appealed to her now.
She’d spent her life doing nothing because her sister had never had the chance to do anything, and the realization twitched her hand so hard she knocked Theresa’s envelope onto the floor.
“F-f-f-f-f,” Alicia muttered, biting off the curse before she could finish it. She picked up the scattered papers and shuffled them back together.
“Trying to keep yourself from putting money in the swear jar?”
She looked up at the sound of a familiar voice. Her heart leaped, catching in her throat at the sight of him; she thought it always would. A dozen more years could pass without seeing him, and she would still find it hard to breathe the first moment she saw him.
“You caught me. I’m trying to be more ladylike.”
Nikolai laughed. “Good luck with that.”
She tossed a crumpled piece of paper at him. “Bitch.”
“Jerk.” He grinned and ducked out of the way from another paper missile. He bent to pick up both bits of trash and tossed them in the can with his free hand. The other held a suspiciously delicious-smelling, grease-spotted paper sack. “So, what’s up?”
Alicia leaned back in her chair. “Why don’t you tell me? Since you’ve shown up unannounced again.”
He looked embarrassed. “I guess I could call or text first, huh?”
“You could. But no worries. I’m just trying to keep this place from falling down, that’s all. The usual. Your brother’s back to work, by the way.”
“Yeah, he was gone when I left this morning.”
She waited, but that was all he said. She hated having to drag out the words, like pulling a splinter from a wound. “Nikolai.”
“So, I feel like an asshole.” Nikolai held up the bag. “I brought doughnuts from the Donut Shack.”
“Far be it from me to turn down a doughnut,” Alicia said, but made no move to take the bag, or motion for him to take a seat. “But I’m kind of over the whole doughnut thing.”
He got her. Always had. His gaze flashed. He held the bag up higher, but his voice dipped lower.
“Yeah? You sure? They’re really . . . really good.” He let the tip of his tongue dent his bottom lip for a second.