“Mom,” Shannon hedged.
“I mean it. I want to help plan a wedding. I want to dance at my son’s wedding. I want grandchildren! How much longer will I have to wait for all that?”
I wondered if I could in fact have children. Trevor had said I couldn’t but that was probably all part of his elaborate lie. Had he really gotten the snip? Maybe the reason he wouldn’t let me handle the food was he’d been slipping birth control into it.
“Can’t you just be happy I’m seeing someone?” Shannon asked, clearly uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.
Millie switched her attention to me. “Elodie, would you marry him if he asked you to?”
“I... um...” I didn’t know what Shannon wanted me to say. I was pretty sure if he wanted to continue this charade to coddle his mother’s fantasies that I wouldn’t have much choice in the matter.
“Mom, don’t put her on the spot. You’re making her uncomfortable. We haven’t discussed the subject. This is still new. I promise if we do, you’ll be the first person to hear about it.”
After that, the rest of dessert and coffee went smoothly. Frank let Millie carry most of the conversation. When everyone was finished eating, I was surprised to see him collect the dinner plates and take them to the kitchen. From the beginning, he’d struck me as the kind of guy that went to watch football immediately after dinner, leaving the women to clean up after the meal they’d cooked.
“I’ve never met a man who loves washing dishes, but Frank does. He also does his own laundry. Did I get a keeper or what?” she asked.
How these two people’s genes had mingled to create Shannon was probably one of the universe’s strangest mysteries.
We didn’t linger long after dinner, Shannon made an excuse, saying he had to get some work done. I wondered what his family thought he did for a living now that he was out of the military.
“Well, that was bracing,” I said as Shannon started the car.
“They mean well. You did good in there.”
I knew there could still be some secret abuse that I wasn’t aware of. But from what I’d seen, they really did seem to love Shannon. They were proud of him, almost achingly so, and believed him to be a good man, a hero even. And in some twisted sense, I knew that was true, both for me and for the country at large.
“What are you thinking?” Shannon asked.
I stared out the window at the nice houses with well-manicured lawns, not unlike the neighborhood Shannon lived in, though it was a bit of a drive to get to his parents’ house since they lived in Savannah, while his house was in a smaller town nearby. “I just don’t understand how you could have been raised by people like that and be what you are.”
Shannon frowned. “It’s not as if they made no difference. In a different environment I would have turned out far worse.”
“What’s worse than being a killer?” For a moment, I almost thought I’d wounded him somehow and felt guilty for it. Then I wondered if he was just manipulating my emotions. Didn’t sociopaths do that?
“I’m not out slaughtering innocents, Elodie. The world is better off without the people I’ve killed. The people I kill deserve to die, and I enjoy killing them. It’s win-win for everybody who matters.”
There it was. Everybody who matters. For now, his family mattered enough that he wouldn’t slaughter them unless pushed into a corner. And the white cat mattered. And I mattered. For now, for whatever reason, I might matter enough that he’d be unwilling to kill me in almost any scenario, but I wasn’t sure how secure being in the everybody who matters circle really was. I wanted to believe it was secure, because God knew I needed something secure. Even if it was amoral.
Chapter Seven
When we got home, Shannon fed the white cat then took me to the basement. He’d cleaned up down here. It was so clean the place nearly sparkled and seemed new. The dark brown hardwood floors were especially shiny and nice as if he’d spent hours down here polishing them to a high finish.
Off my confused expression at the state of the space, Shannon said, “Sometimes I can’t sleep. When I can’t sleep, I clean.”
That explained a lot about why his house was so irritatingly shiny all the time. I wondered how bad his insomnia was and if he’d given me my own room because of it.
“Why don’t you sleep?” I asked.
He shrugged. “My mind stays busy. Planning jobs, thinking of possible things that can go wrong and planning for those contingencies.”