Page 66 of Intrepid

She knelt in front of a headstone, setting the bouquet of flowers down in front of her. As I approached, I expected to find that her mother had been buried in the same place as my dad, but that wouldn’t make sense, given where she’d grown up.

For the second time in less than a half hour, I couldn’t breathe.

I stared down at the small gravesite that read Eli Trombley, with only his birthdate etched into the stone. Of course, they wouldn’t have known the date of his death, because his body was never found. Acids climbed my throat, and I stood frozen, gazing at what I knew to be an empty hole in the ground.

“I lied to my father today.” She sat down on the grass, folding her legs. “Told him I was studying for exams all evening. He’d kill me if he knew I was here.”

“Why’s that?”

“He doesn’t understand the concept of love. The way it drives you to hang on, when everything else is forcing you to let go.” With a huff, she pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, and hell if her words didn’t echo my thoughts right then.

I’d spent ten long years trying to let go, going about my life as a puppet of the justice system that’d ultimately failed me.

“I remember when I first came to live with him, right after my mother died. I was a mess. I’d lost the most important thing in my life.” She spun the bracelet at her wrist, her fingers brushing over the beads that spelled out, ‘I love you’. “The universe just came and plucked her right out of my world, and I was thrown into my father’s. I knew even then he didn’t want to deal with me. So I locked myself in my bathroom. My bathroom. I’d never had my own bathroom before then. I plopped down on the white tile floors and sliced my wrist with a … stupid pocketknife I used to carry around. I remember thinking, oh, my God, the blood’s going to stain the white tiles, and he’ll be so mad about that.” She breathed a laugh and sniffed, abandoning the bracelet for the grass she plucked from beside her. “It was Jo who found me. I’d passed out from the sight of the blood, but I hadn’t cut deep enough to do damage. She kept saying, Just hold on, honey. Hold on. Everything is going to be okay.” Her eyes watered with tears, and she quickly swiped them away, her chest rising with a deep breath. “That’s all I wanted my dad to tell me. And here was this stranger, saying the words that I was so desperate to hear. Hold on.”

Words I, myself, had spoken to Eli.

I could almost hear the tearing sounds of Sera peeling back the layers on her face, the porcelain façade she wore, so well, that even I couldn’t see what was beneath. There was so much more to her, so much deeper than the surface.

“Eli was her son.” When she turned to face me, her smile coaxed the tears onto her cheeks, and she wiped them dry.

I remained silent. Watching her. Waiting for the ugly villain to rear her head and justify the anger I’d felt toward her for so long.

“I’m sorry. You’d think, after all these years, it’d be easier for me.”

“Why are we here?”

“I try to come once a month for Jo. She told me just before the stroke that she dreaded the day she’d stop coming to her son’s grave. So I … I do it for her, when I can.”

“You visit his grave every month?”

She nodded, tearing at the tall bits of grass grown up around his stone. “It’s actually an empty grave. He was kidnapped when he was about fifteen years old, him and another boy.”

Hearing her talk was almost laughable, as she recounted her version of what had happened to Eli and me. Except, as she knew it, we were held by the junkie homeless guy who woke up after a meth nap, with guns in his face, charged with murder. That was what the news had reported about it, anyway. The police had found Eli’s clothing, blood, and hair samples scattered all over an abandoned house near the Packard Plant. My statements were deemed contradictory and unreliable, and they’d arrested who they believed had murdered my best friend.

Sera pushed to a stand and sighed, staring down at the grave. “Have you ever hated someone you were supposed to love, and loved someone you were supposed to hate?”

I could hardly focus on her words, as all my strategies unraveled around me. I felt everything and nothing at the same time. Confusion and clarity. I needed to get away from her and reconfigure the plan, but as if my body refused to obey, I followed the new rules of the game. The ones where I no longer called the shots, but, instead, watched from the sidelines. Waiting for the next move.

“What do you mean? Who were you supposed to hate?”

“Jo accused my father of having something to do with Eli’s disappearance. When they caught the man who did it, she dropped the charges against my father and apologized, but he didn’t want anything to do with her after that.” She huffed, her jaw shifting as her brows pinched together. “He single-handedly ensured that she never found work again. And when she had a stroke, and they put her in that … horrible place, I …” Dropping her gaze didn’t hide the second round of tears welling in her eyes, and fucking hell, I didn’t know how much more I could hear. How much more I could take, like fate beating the shit out of me for being so blind to the truth. “I refused to let her stay there and rot like … like she didn’t matter to anyone.”

“You’ve been taking care of her all these years.”

“It was the least I could do for Eli.” With a glance back at his grave, she walked toward me, and we both kept on toward the bike. Pinching a strand of her hair, she twirled it around her finger. “Doesn’t matter now. He cut us off.”

“Cut you off, how?” Every question that spilled from my mouth only gave rise to new questions, an endless horizon of shit that didn’t make sense.

“My father pays for Joanne’s care. Her apartment. Her medicine. Her nurse. It was a deal we made. I’d study Criminal Justice, go to law school and follow in my daddy’s footsteps. He’d have his sole heir to take over the firm. In exchange, he would supply the funds to pay for her care.”

“You gave up art.”

“The alternative was giving up on Jo. Kinda felt like a no-brainer.”

Christ. She’d given up her life, her dreams to take care of Eli’s mom.

An ache throbbed in my skull, and I rubbed the heel of my hand against my temple. My whole body felt like a beam, swinging off balance, waiting to crash into something.