“What did he say?” I ask.
Shane shoves away from his leaning perch, giving me an amused look. “You want to know what a guy said about you breaking into his house in the middle of the night and making yourself comfortable in his bed?”
“He didn’t give you details,” I say. “He would never do that. I mean about the vanishing part.”
“He was pissed.”
“Good.”
“And he said he was going to hunt you down today and kidnap you. And that he was going to force you to listen to him until all of this bullshit was sorted out.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
Shane smirks. “You tell me. You guys looked like you wanted to claw each other’s faces off back at Friday’s, but from the sounds of things, the two of you were a little more accommodating in the wee hours of the morning.”
I chose to ignore that barb, too. “I was blindsided. And drunk. And sad. This place…how the hell have you stayed here for so long, Shane?”
Shane sighs. “I had a blast here when I was a kid. I spent the best years of my life jumping into creeks. Catching bull frogs. Climbing trees. I met the love of my life here. I got married here. I own my own business here. I’m about to have my first kid here. Why would I ever wanna leave?”
When he puts it like that, it makes me sound mad for ever wanting to run away. It’s wild how a roll of the dice and sheer luck can give you a totally different experience in life. It happens all the time. People are born in countries without basic human rights, oppressed, starving and murdered in their thousands under the cover of darkness, while others are born in Beverley Hills, spoiled beyond measure, knowing only excess and opportunity. In the microcosm that is Port Royal, being born two streets away from me meant that Shane had the most idyllic childhood possible. Meanwhile, I lost my mother, the woman who took her place, the guy I loved, my innocence and the larger part of everything good inside me.
Shane looks sorry for me. “You know…we were just kids, but you could have told me. You could have told any of us. You didn’t need to go through any of that stuff with your father on your own.”
I look back now and I know that he’s right. It was sheer madness that I didn’t confide in someone, but long-term abuse does strange things to the mind. Especially young, impressionable minds, who have only ever known that abuse. I nod, looking down at my shoes. I don’t even know what to say to that—anything I might tell him is completely pointless now, years after the fact.
“They won’t release his body,” I say. “Not until I ID him. And I can’t go home until I’ve buried him.”
“Why not? If you’re really this unhappy, you should just leave him in that cabinet in the morgue.” Shane brushes his hair back out of his face, deep lines forming on his forehead. “It’s not as if they’ll keep him there forever, Coralie. They’ll have to put him in the ground at some point.”
“If I don’t make sure he gets the funeral he wants, I don’t get my mother’s things,” I say tiredly. “He would never let me have them when I was younger. I wasn’t allowed to see them, touch them, go through them. Of all the mind games he would play, he knew that one hurt me the most. And he’s still playing it now, even after he’s dead. Still trying to control me, force me to do what he wants, bend me to his will.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. So…I have to decide whether I want Mom’s things, or if I want to forego the trauma of identifying his body.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but haven’t you lived without your momma’s things for the past twenty years, Cora? Would it be so bad if you never got them back?”
He has a valid point. “It’s not even about her things any more. They’re just books. Shoes. Dresses. Things I don’t need to survive. But if I let him win this, how do I survive that? There won’t be a round two somewhere later on down the track. There won’t be another time for me to stand up to him. He’ll be nothing more than a corpse, rotting in the ground, and I’ll be stuck with the knowledge that I let him get the better of me one last time.”
Shane walks around the counter and places his arm over my shoulders. “Then it seems to me you know exactly what you need to do,” he says.
“Yeah. Perhaps. But not today, though. I just don’t have it in me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CALLAN
Patience
NOW