Page 24 of Redemption

I launch into the explanation, and by the end, Zemi is just staring at me. “That’s why you said you had a headache this morning. I just thought you’d had a good night. Seriously, how do you get into these situations?”

I shrug. “This time it was definitely because I wasn’t paying enough attention to my surroundings and the weather. I was too caught up in my emotions.”

Zemi nods, she’s well caught up on the whole mother situation, mostly because of her involvement with Hunt, and because she’s my friend and we share shit like that.

Although having said that, we’re both very private people, and I’m aware that there is quite a lot I don’t know about Zemi. Actually, I know nothing about her past, or family, or how she and the guys became a team. She doesn’t know that about me either, except for maybe a few things that came as part of our reputation before we joined the organization, and it occurs to me that actually we know even less about each other than I thought. The only reason that she knows about my mom is that she was directly involved with a job that the organization was involved in too. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have said anything.

It’s not that I don’t trust her, nor is it that she doesn’t trust me. It’s just how we live our lives. We spend the majority of our time keeping things private for safety reasons mostly, so it's just natural for us to do it. I mean, the guys and I have been with the organization for, shit, I don’t know how long. I really should know that. I know that it’s been years, obviously, but how many is anyone's guess. I’ll ask Trick at some point, he’ll know. What I was trying to get at is that we’ve been hiding who we really are and personal things about ourselves for years, and I know that Zemi and her men have been doing the same.

It’s who we are.

I am glad that she knows about Amelia though.

“Are you going to go to the funeral?” Zemi asks as she sips her drink.

I don’t know where the guys have gotten to, but I’m assuming that the kitchen isn’t that big and that they’ve gone on a tour of the rest of the house because I can’t hear them.

Staring into my cup for a moment, I shake my head. “No, I’m not. The mother that I thought I had didn’t really exist. She never cared about me, and if she ever did, it wasn’t enough for her to not behave shitty. I may visit the grave one day, but I have no desire to attend her funeral.” Glancing up at Zemi, I ask, “Does that make me a shitty person?”

Zemi shakes her head. “No. If it makes you a shitty person, then it makes me one too.”

The meaning hits me immediately, and I’m instantly flooded with thousands of questions that I want to ask. I’m not going to ask any of them though. I wouldn’t want someone asking me thousands of questions, and Zemi’s usually open expression has shut down completely. That tells me everything that I need to know. That subject is off limits.

“So what are your plans for the place?” I ask, changing the subject. “You said you guys were renovating, right?”

Zemi gives me a grateful smile and then jumps up, her coffee somehow not spilling everywhere as she says, “Yeah, come on, I’ll show you the safe zones.”

“Safe zones?” I ask, my eyebrow raising curiously as I get up and follow her out of the room and through a different door than the one that we walked through when we arrived, and a different one from the one that the guys left through as well.

There are a lot of doors in this place. I think I would probably end up getting lost a lot if I lived here.

She nods and points to a set of double doors as we walk down a wide hallway. “Yeah. Some rooms aren’t actually safe to go in. The floors are rotten, or the ceilings are about to fall down, that sort of thing.”

“Oh really? I never would have guessed. The kitchen, and what we saw when we walked through the house to get there, was beautiful.”

She smiles, “Thank you. Because of work, we can only do small parts here and there, so we started with the rooms that we need the most. One of the living rooms, the kitchen, bathrooms, the bedrooms, and then we picked random rooms.”

“Not the worst ones first?” I ask curiously.

We redid the cabin, but it wasn’t a full renovation, and although it’s huge, because it needs to be because there are so many of us, it is nothing compared to the size of this house. We did do the rooms a couple at a time, depending on which ones we needed more, so we did the kitchen, utility, and the extension all at once and then went through the house like that.

I have no idea what it’s like to do a renovation of this scale.

I would have thought that you would want to start with the worst rooms first though and then go from there.

“We started to do it that way, since it seemed like the most logical way to do it, but the rooms need so much work, and progress is so slow because we keep having to stop and start, and we never know how long we’re going to be gone for and all of that shit, and because of that it became too disheartening to be working on rooms for months at a time because we kept having to stop and start all the time and not actually see any progress whatsoever. So now we do work on them but have simpler rooms and projects where we can finish it quicker,” she explains.

“That makes sense actually. I would probably have to do the same if I did a project of this scale. I was bad enough when we were getting the extension done, and that was done pretty fucking quickly,” I admit with a slight grimace.

I may or may not have driven the guys slightly crazy with that.

She laughs, “Yeah, I drove the guys mad at the beginning, although Saint wasn’t much better. Zee just got on with a lot of it as he does, and Raid enjoyed the organization of it immensely. Plus he’s an amazing designer. None of us really knew about the extent of his talent until we started doing stuff here. Wilder had a field day with the spreadsheets and budgets and all manner of other things that I have no idea what they’re actually for, but they make him happy, and they keep the progress ticking along even if it's slow.”

“I can see why Zee would be happy just doing his thing here. Sounds like you’ve got everything figured out,” I reply.

“Not even close, but the house is big enough that when they piss me off I can avoid them for days if I want to,” Zemi grins.

“Oh, I bet they love that,” I grin.