thirty-seven.
Marsden’s legs stayed shaky as she left Seconds and headed toward the post office.
She couldn’t stop from making ugly connections, all the possible scenarios sprouting to life in her mind like bad spots on fruit.
Brom didn’t look good in any of them.
He followed her father after Fitz and the others had already gone back inside, unnoticed. Had then robbed him. Had then left him for the river.
Or he’d followed him, saw him in danger from the river, and had done nothing.
Or he’d followed him, killed him, and the river had swallowed up the signs of murder.
Or he hadn’t followed at all. Had stayed at Decks, or even gone elsewhere.
But whatever had happened, he’d stayed quiet to Shine about ever being there that night. He’d hidden it—and for eight years. And that, most of all, proved he was guilty. Of robbery, at the least. And maybe even of murder.
She’d wanted to leave his photo behind at Seconds for Fitz to throw away with the rest of the day’s garbage. The idea of Brom’s face swarming around her father’s, and his money, and his night of luck—her stomach rolled.
Instead, Marsden had asked to see Seconds’ phone book. She looked up Brom’s address and scrawled it onto the photo—directly on his face, admittedly—before slipping it back into her pocket. She would mail Adam Lytton his cash and then she would bike over to Brom’s. Shine had a hair appointment in the afternoon, and according to Nina, Brom was never at the boardinghouse without her. Marsden wanted to catch him at home, while he was still alone. She wanted to ask him what he remembered of a night eight years ago, when there had been a terrible spring storm, and as it’d been building up, how he’d been in Decks, watching her father have a winning night.
The mailbox was just up ahead, and she was already holding the envelope of cash in her hand when the sound of her name came from behind.
“Marsden?”
Her heart flew into her throat and she spun around to face him.
His eyes, lit with a smile that made her pulse go uneven, teasing her mind back to his bedroom and his bed and his hands. He held a take-out tray of coffee. Against the backdrop of the dusty road, the sun-beaten buildings and storefronts of Glory, he stood out like a beacon.
“Jude.” She hurriedly stuffed the envelope back into the rear pocket of her shorts with fumbling fingers as he came to meet her. Panic and heat danced a tango in her stomach. “What are you doing here? I thought you worked in the mornings.”
He took her hand with his free one, tugged her closer. She smelled coffee and lavender, planting soil, the savory sting of rosemary. “I used to. I just quit. The coffee at Roadie’s sucked too bad.”
She laughed and he leaned in, kissing her until they both needed to breathe and still they kept going. It was impossible to melt from the inside out, as indisputable a fact as laws concerning gravity, combustion, the speed of light—but she might very well be the first to do so.
He eased away and said against her lips, “That thing you said once about kismet, remember?”
Marsden swam up from through the clouds. Kismet. Meaning things being preordained, things meant to be. Fate. “Is your being out here kismet?”
“How else do you explain the coffee machine in the staff room finally busting this morning? That sucker’s been on the verge for years. Add in my being the only one around for Roadie to force on a volunteer caffeine run and”—another slow kiss that Marsden felt in her toes, the tips of her fingers—“kismet. The good kind.”
The presence of the letter in her back pocket turned sharp, a nest of brambles against the denim that poked through to her skin, and she flushed against Jude’s lips.
She could easily have been holding cash meant for Rigby instead of Adam Lytton. If not for her involvement with his brother, if she’d somehow been delayed over the weeks in sending it, maybe Jude would have gotten it in the mail that very morning on his way to work. Would have seen his dead brother’s name on the envelope and been torn apart all over again.
Maybe it was the fate that simply hadn’t happened yet.
Marsden sighed against Jude’s neck and pretended that fate was also the wrong one.
“What are you doing out here?” He leaned back and peered at her more closely. “I thought you had to check the covert in the mornings.”
She stiffened, then forced her shoulders to drop. “I already did. And now I have some errands.”
“The post office, right? You were holding a letter.”
Marsden shook her head so fast she got dizzy. “No, not—It was something else, actually. But I was just about to head home. I did promise someone lunch, if he wants to come over early.”
“About yesterday, your friend . . . Well, are you sure you’re still okay with my coming over in the afternoons? I can always look on my own, if you’d be okay with that. If you really don’t want to be there.”
She leaned against him, tried to believe allowing him to be in the covert was some kind of atonement. “The covert is the covert. I just have to deal with it.”
Jude bent down and kissed the side of her neck. “Okay, now I seriously have to bring back coffee for Roadie or the guy is going to put me on manure duty again—last time, it took me over two days to stop smelling crap everywhere I went. Want to come over to say hi before you head home?”
“You want your boss to meet me?” she asked, sure she’d misheard. Everyone in town had already met her, more or less. She had a label, a box in which to stay, making her easy to figure out.
He smiled. “Yeah, I do want that. Roadie’s a good guy. And it feels wrong that you haven’t met him yet.”
So it bothered him, then—that she’d met Leo before Roadie. Marsden pictured the garden center from the last time she was there, its stretch of sun-washed display floor, the splashes of color and fragrance and everything that was somehow the opposite of Glory. She’d wondered if she’d see Roadie inside, if she’d get a glimpse of the man Jude thought of as a father. But instead, it’d been Leo who’d showed up, the last person she’d expected to see, his presence like an errant thorn.
“Did Roadie love your mom, you think?” she asked. What made a person love someone who wasn’t theirs? Brom and her once-married mother. Her wanting Jude, when she already had the world working against her.
“Maybe, yeah.” Jude didn’t seem bothered by it at all. “I could never ask, but . . . maybe. When I was kid, I once asked him to be my dad. I was seven, and I remember his face and how I could tell he’d wanted to say yes, but couldn’t. Seeing him so torn was almost harder than hearing the no.”
She thought of her father, who’d said to her face he’d never wanted her. She thought of Shine, who couldn’t seem to make up her mind between blaming and loving her.
Meanwhile, Roadie would have taken Jude for his own.
“Sure, I’ll come say hi,” Marsden said impulsively. “Should I prepare myself to hear really embarrassing kid stories about you?”
“He’s going to say me and Rig were a couple of shits, that’s for sure,” he said, laughing.
“Well, were you?”
“Absolutely. Me crawling around eating garbage off the display floor and giving him heart attacks, Rig drowning out the inventory with too much water. Really, thinking about it, he must have loved my mom to have that kind of patience with kids who weren’t his own.”
And it’d been Roadie who’d given Isabel that first ginger plant, the very same one that Rigby would later save by bringing to the covert. Which still grew there now, so thickly and deeply she could never imagine the place without it.
Just how much did Roadie know about her family? Raised in Glory and as old as he was, he’d be no stranger to the history of the covert, the stories and legends that went with it. Jude had said as much when he’d told her Roadie still recalled the place without ginger, before it’d gained its signature spice, the scent that anointed its bodies. He would have read all about Grant Eldridge’s tragic death, the reports about Nina buying the boardinghouse at the east end of the Indigo. And whether he chose to believe or not, he would have heard the rumors about Shine no longer working there as just a housekeeper.
What if he took one look at Marsden and assumed she was doing the same?
What if Jude read that in his eyes? Jude, who’d revealed everything to her in asking for her help?
Marsden was suddenly painfully aware of just how many secrets she was still keeping from him. Rigby’s note. Being a skimmer. Trying to hear the dead. Her mother’s plans for her.
“Jude.” Nerves pulsed in her throat. She felt sick. “You know about my grandmother being able to hear the dead, right?” She didn’t see how he couldn’t. It was like Theola being a psychic: basic Glory knowledge.
He nodded.
“What do you know about my mother hearing the dead?”
“I assumed she couldn’t, since I’ve never heard of anyone going to her for that.”
She took a deep breath. “What else do you know about my mother?”
A second’s pause. “She’s a cleaner at the boardinghouse.”
“You’ve heard nothing else about her work there?”
Jude looked, she saw with a sinking heart, distinctly uncomfortable. “I’ve heard the stories, Marsden.”
“And if I said they were true?” Her words came out bitterly, pills being yanked back to the surface. A dread that bordered on fear danced on her tongue, pushed the dusty storefronts and dirty concrete pavement all around them further into the background. “How much would that bother you?”
“It doesn’t. I admit it did at first. But now I know you, really know you, and it’s like . . . You’re you, and whatever your mom wants to do is just . . . everything else. The rest doesn’t matter.”
But you don’t know me. Not really.
“Think of it this way.” He shifted the take-out tray to his other hand. Marsden had the vague thought the coffees would be nearly cold by now, and wondered if it meant Roadie would stop asking Jude to go on food runs. “Does it bother you to hear stories about my father, or when people keep trying to guess why Rig killed himself?”
“It bothers me for you.”
“So, okay, then.”
“But what you hear about me—that doesn’t bother you? How I’m not going to inherit a house or money, just the creepiest piece of land in all of Glory? That I’m destined to forever work at the boardinghouse in some way?” She thought about Nina’s threat and shuddered. “I know everyone at school talks about it—about me, who I am, who I’m meant to be. A lot of it won’t be wrong. A lot of it might eventually matter to you.”
Jude narrowed his eyes a fraction, and when he didn’t speak right away, Marsden’s heart sank further.
“Going to see you at the covert that first time, all I could hear were those stories,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know you, so what everyone else said, I listened to all of it. And no, not all of it’s wrong—your folks, the covert, those are a part of you, too. But you’re also way more than just those things. You are outside of them. You are beyond them.”
She blinked so the world didn’t blur, but it blurred anyway. He was saying everything she wanted to hear, but he didn’t know how she had no options left. How could she tell him the person he’d come to discover was going to change again? That the person he thought was better than all those terrible things was really nothing but those things?
Jude leaned close to kiss her, and Marsden let herself pretend again about that one kind of fate being wrong. “Now c’mon, before Roadie refuses to let me back into the shop.”