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Nothing she felt gave her any indication that she was ready, not one single thing. Only eight weeks had passed since it happened, eight weeks that felt more like eight seconds.
Signs. There had to have been signs. There almost always were. But Foster had missed every single one, even though she had been trained to lock in, to be observant, intuitive even, to always see three moves ahead. Where had she failed? She had replayed that day over in her head for weeks, eight weeks, but the picking didn’t change anything.
Dead was forever. A chance missed to say just the right thing or do the right thing would never come around again.
The shirt, pants, and jacket she had on today were new. Fresh start and all that. Even her hair was different.
Only the adage assumed that once the secrets were released, there’d be a new, fresh person left behind.
Bodie became awkward and sullen, disconnected afterward. She found art. She discovered that she could pour everything she felt or thought or feared into a canvas and have her world all make sense. She could bring order to chaos, perspective to the incomprehensible. Art, her art, was life and emotion, the air in her lungs, her every breath. It was alive, and it was hers, and no one could take it away.
Tom Morgan’s infection of evil had become their shame, their secret, their family legacy.
Even now, though, as he neared the house—as his reluctant feet slapped against the concrete sidewalk, as he stirred up fallen leaves in his path, his eyes boring into the shingles—he had the very eerie sense that his father’s eyes were tracking him.
He often wondered what went on behind all those windows. Who lived or worked inside? Were they happy? Did they have fantastic careers and kids and dreams? Were they sick and twisted with friendly smiles? He liked to imagine they were happy, normal, and that he might fit in their world if only he didn’t know what he knew—that where there was light there was also darkness.
As the dog trotted along at her side, she talked on her cell phone. She was likely making plans for the night, Bodie thought. Dinner out, maybe, or a meetup at a favorite bar. That was what life was like for people not raised on evil secrets.
It was a cosmic joke, a curse, a nightmare. A mother wasn’t meant to survive her children. But she had work, and she’d rediscovered a pocket of resilience. And then it rained one morning eight weeks ago, and her partner, her friend, was gone.
Their relationship, such as it was, was based purely on mutual need. Lost needed food to stay alive and knew it could be found at her door. She needed someone to care for, even if it only took the form of a bowl of milk and scraps given to a cat that came and went as he saw fit.
He’d said it before countless times, that the place felt cold, lifeless, a stopgap, as though she didn’t intend to stay long, as if she deliberately kept her home this way so that it would take her less than a minute to break everything down and go.
The big glass vase was a calendar of sorts. She’d dropped the first marble in the day Reggie was killed—absently, not really thinking about it—but then she’d dropped a marble in every day since. She also marked the days with coins and buttons and little found things slipped into a pocket. Every marble, every pin, was another day, another hour, forward.
“Eventually, there comes a time when weak little bullies come up against someone tougher.” Foster strolled over to the door, opened it, but didn’t leave right away. She took another long look at Stella. “For you, that’s today.”
“Who died and made you arbiter of everyone else’s morals? Her life is her life. How she lives it is none of your concern.
She could just go up and ring his bell, and they could talk, but she knew Bodie would lie, and she knew she would let him because Bodie needed those lies to live.
“The slaughter of innocents is an abomination,” Grant had once whispered to her as they’d stood over her son here. Foster had agreed with her then and now.
Habit. Necessity. Whichever it was, she was sure that she wasn’t ready to stop marking time. She knew that wanting to live and knowing how to live on were different things.
