Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A) (43 page)

Shannon didn’t say anything while our coffees were brewing, and once I stopped being annoyed at her manipulating me into meeting, I noticed she was nervous. She was gnawing on her lip and stealing quick glances at me, then started dismantling her cookie when it arrived on a rustic plate.

“Is Sam all right?”

Her fingers continued breaking the cookie into smaller and smaller pieces until a small pile of sand started forming on her plate. “No, he really isn’t okay,” she said, and tears sprang to her eyes. They spilled over, and ran down her perfectly applied makeup. There were freckles under all that foundation, and they were pretty.

I grabbed her wrist to slow the cookie decimation. “Honeybunch, you need to start talking.”

She nodded and blotted her tears with a napkin. After a shuddering breath, she said, “He’s abandoned all of his projects. He left town, and we aren’t sure where he is, but he said he was going camping.” She returned to the cookie. “I thought it would be a long weekend. I didn’t think he was serious when he said he needed to be away from here.”

He wasn’t sick or injured, and he wasn’t spreading the clap. For that, I could be thankful, but . . . I didn’t think there was a place for me in his life anymore, regardless of whether I wanted one. “And you’re telling me this because . . . ?”

She held out her hands and sent me an aggravated look. “Because . . . because I want to know why! I want to know why he walked away from everything and what happened to make him so miserable.”

Carefully setting the cappuccino on the table, I sat back and laced my fingers together. “You presume I had something to do with it?”

Her eyes widened as she stared at the cookie sand on her plate. “As a matter of fact, yes. I believe you were dating my brother at one point, and now that you’re not, he finds it necessary to vanish into the woods.”

Great. I was going to offend another Walsh today.

“Shannon, I’m not clear how that’s any of your business. Sam is an adult and he does not need you or anyone else managing every one of the minute details of his life. Anything that transpired between us was just that—between
us.
”

For a second, her eyes flashed with fury and I expected an authentic ginger tantrum, but it morphed into sadness. She held the crumpled napkin to her mouth and burst into tears. This was not what I expected from Shannon Walsh.

She cried for several minutes, and I waved off the coffee shop’s staff every time they ventured toward us with concerned frowns. We were probably scaring away their regular clientele.

Eventually it came to a sniffling, gasping stop, and she excused herself to the ladies’ room. When she returned, her eyes were puffy, her nose was reddened, her foundation wiped clean, but her seriousness was now mixed with a stripe of sad.

“My mother,” she started. “She died when we were young.” She motioned toward me with her coffee. “Did you know that?”

“Yes.” I didn’t mention that Sam shared it last summer, or that I knew exponentially more about her and her family than she knew about me.

“Right, of course.”

She nodded to herself and ran her hand through her hair, ruffling the smooth, styled wave she had going. I liked it better messy, but that was my preference for most things.

“I raised my brothers and sister. I’ve been Head Bitch in Charge since I was nine. All I have ever done is manage the minute details of their lives. When they were kids, I made sure they were bathed and wearing clean clothes. I sewed buttons and fixed hems because there was no one else to do it. I took care of them when they were sick. I signed their report cards and paid bills. I went to work selling houses when I was eighteen so they could go away to college. I got them
through
it. And now that we’re adults? I’m still getting them through it. I schedule their doctors’ appointments. I file their taxes. I register their cars. I can’t remember a time when my life wasn’t about taking care of them. I meddle in their lives because I have been a lot more than their sister for nearly twenty-four years.”

I traced the edge of my cup as the minutes passed. I didn’t know what to say. I only knew how to handle these situations with kids, and I usually had an instrument to fill the silence.

“They don’t need me anymore, not the way they used to. I thought it was a good thing, but I can’t find the balance between being there too much and not enough. I’ve been trying to focus on myself.”

She laughed as if it was a ridiculous endeavor and twisted the skinny silver bracelets on her wrist.

“It began with online dating a few years back. That’s pretty much the worst invention in the world.” Shannon rolled her eyes and shuddered. “But then Matt started dating Lauren, and now she’s my best friend. I didn’t know how to be friends with girls before her, and Lauren taught me,” she said quietly. “She says nice things about you.”

“I bet she does,” I murmured.

She ruffled her hair again, and now it was borderline wild. “I started seeing someone last summer. ‘Seeing’ probably isn’t the right word. It’s more like scheduled sex. Really, really incredible sex.” She looked up, disoriented. “I can’t believe I just said that out loud.”

“Keep going,” I said. If she could demand the details of my relationship, I could ask the same.

“So, this all has been occurring,” she said primly. “And I’ve been trying to maintain everything else, but I haven’t been able to. I keep thinking that I should have been there for Sam when your relationship ended, but instead I was six states away for scheduled sex. I was supposed to be ending it, but . . . that didn’t go as planned.”

“Do you swoop in when all your brothers’ relationships end?”

She lifted a shoulder and sipped her coffee. “My brothers don’t have many relationships. Patrick kept his a secret for months. Matt holds me at a distance. Riley’s still a toddler in my eyes. And Sam . . . well, Sam changed this year, and I didn’t notice. I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t there, and I let him down.”

“But the sex? It was decent?”

She blushed—hard—and pressed her fist to her mouth to cover a huge smile. “I haven’t been able to get on a bike for spin class since.” She laughed, but the happiness was gone. “If I’m not taking care of my brothers, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

I drained my cappuccino and shifted in my seat, hoping I could make an exit. I didn’t have the right words for her, and it wasn’t like I’d ever see her again.

“May I ask what happened? With you and Sam?” Shannon said.

She cared about him, and I appreciated it deeply because I’d dedicated the past few months to disliking her. That didn’t mean I was rehashing anything. “I hope he finds what he’s looking for, wherever he is.”

It sounded pretty and tidy that way, but in reality it was a gigantic fucking mess.

Shannon frowned, clearly hoping for more, and that was my cue to leave. I gathered my things and dropped some cash on the table.

“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” I said. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing. I hope it gets easier.”

I turned away from the table, and Shannon said, “When he figures it all out and comes back, give him a chance. Please don’t turn him away. He’s so much more sensitive than he likes us to believe.”

I pivoted, staring at her for a long minute. “Shannon, I know exactly how sensitive he is. You don’t need to tell me that.”

And I know how to love him,
I thought.

A FEW DAYS—maybe even a week—alone was nice. Calming. Restful.

A month alone was a purge and cleanse.

Two months alone was the most arduous experience of my life. I fished and hiked and read, but through it all, I couldn’t escape my thoughts.

My hurt quickly tripped over into anger, and from there, I lingered in rage for too many days to count. I yelled at the trees, chucked so many stones into the river that my shoulder ached for a week, stomped up snow-covered mountains until my legs felt like noodles, chopped enough wood to heat most of Nova Scotia for the winter.

It took a fish to pull me out of that rage.

It was a beautiful striped bass, and it bit on my line during the type of fiery sunrise that warned sailors back to the shore. When I had it secured in the ice chest, I powered up the outboard motor and steered the boat toward the bay. I was fifteen minutes from land when the skies opened, letting loose torrential freezing rain mixed with hail and thundersnow, and there was nothing for me to do but ride it out.

I was shivering and soaked when I docked, but if I didn’t prepare the bass soon, it would spoil. Despite the heavy, wet snow, I jogged to the cleaning station downstream from the cabin and set to gutting the fish. Lightning struck no more than fifty yards away, zapping a low bush and singeing everything within a narrow radius. I jolted and my concentration faltered, and instead of stripping the fish’s innards, I drove my knife into my thigh.

Cold, wet, and bleeding, I dropped to the ground and cursed every corner of the universe. Sitting on that rocky Maine beach in early March, my hands wrapped around my leg, I hated
everything.
There was nothing left to celebrate, to love, to desire, and I was so fucking mad at the world.

I wanted it to be someone’s fault. I wanted
everything
to be someone’s fault and I wanted to forward my fury toward that person.

But all of that was futile.

Regardless of how much anger I was cultivating, I was still alone, bleeding all over myself while I cried in the snow, and nothing was going to change unless I dragged my ass off that beach. I was the only one who could release that rage and free myself from all of it. I was the only one who could clean up after my mess.

So I got up. It hurt like hell and I was certain I’d ground oyster shell shards and fish guts into my exposed flesh in the process, but I didn’t let that panic slow me. I got up and I put one limping foot in front of the other.

I called out—it was probably closer to a prissy yelp—when hail struck my shoulder head-on. If I hadn’t already scared off the area bears with my routine hollering, they would have been running for the hills.

The trek to the cabin felt like miles, and when I was finally out of the storm I shucked all of my clothes in a waterlogged pile and examined my self-inflicted stab wound. It wasn’t deadly but there was no way it would heal without stitches.

I waited until the storm blew over to make my way into town. As far as fishing villages went, Cutler was as authentic as they came. It was a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, and in the right light you could see Nova Scotia across the Bay of Fundy. I hadn’t set out for the easternmost village in the state when I left Boston, but I was glad this was where my truck decided to take me.

The people were pleasant; they were curious about a mid-winter newcomer without being nosy, and I appreciated that. The words to explain why I’d fled an otherwise charmed life escaped me, and my baggage didn’t need a seat at the town diner. I only ventured that far from the cabin when I required more supplies or a cell signal to text Riley. There was a respectable barbershop beside the grocery store, but I hadn’t been looking in the mirror with enough frequency to care about my hair.

The doctor chattered about snowfall totals and hockey while he patched me up, but my mind honed in on the sear and tug I experienced with each stitch. It was a reminder that I still felt, but it forced me to acknowledge that if I could feel pain, I was capable of feeling everything else, too.

I capitalized on that pain, and I grounded myself in it every day. I hiked the forests and craggy shoreline, and I made it my goal to bury another bucketful of resentment among the rocks and trees and waves.

At first, I thought it was Angus and God and asshole kids that I was trying to forgive, but as the days passed and my leg healed, I discovered I was the one who needed forgiving. There was so much—my mother’s death, my father’s abuse, childhood bullies, losing Tiel, my long-term self-destruction—and it was time to send all that guilt and loathing away.

I’d experienced terrible things, some of it at my own hand, and I was leaving it all behind.

More rocks were thrown, trees heard my screams, wood was chopped, and slowly—too slowly to notice when it happened—I started feeling better. With the constant supply of ocean-caught fish, I was eating well, and my daily anger exorcism excursions guaranteed I slept long and hard. My blood sugar still had a mind of its own, but I was paying enough attention to handle those swings properly.