Thirty
The next morning she woke to the sound of Ghost yelling, “Why the hell’s some guy trying to drop a Lexus in my driveway?”
“That’s Ronnie’s!” Ava called, fumbling down the hall as she tugged her sandal straps into place. She paused to prop a hand against the wall and get the left shoe secured, and heard Dad barking orders at the flatbed driver from the open front door. “Dad! Don’t turn him away! I gotta sign for that!”
“Do you not hear her?” Maggie chimed in. “That’s Ronnie’s.”
“I don’t want some prick car sitting in front of my house,” Ghost said.
Ava heaved a sigh. Morning with the Teagues. Just like old times.
After Ronnie got out of the shower, the car business had been sorted, and offers of breakfast were politely declined, Ava slid into the passenger seat of the Lexus and sighed with relief.
“Sorry about all that,” she said as Ronnie started the engine. “Dad…well, he’s just Dad.”
“I’m figuring that out,” Ronnie said with a wry half-smile. “So where to first?”
“Stella’s for breakfast,” Ava said, buckling her belt, feeling something like excitement at the idea of the day that lay ahead of them. They’d decided to spend some normal quality time, kicking over rocks in town, window shopping, finalizing the details of Ronnie’s apartment. “Then the book store.”
“I should have guessed that, bookworm.”
“Yes, you should.”
As he backed out of the drive, Ava glanced up in the rearview and caught Littlejohn pulling out behind them. He’d been waiting in the drive at first light, steaming paper cup of coffee in one hand, listening to his iPod, unhurried and patient.
Ava shook her head and rolled her eyes. Normal was a negotiable word, after all.
**
High school had treated a select handful like kings, and all the rest had been churned up in the machine, spat back out with an impressive collection of bruises and scars. Aidan had known one way of life, and because of it, he’d never been one of the kings. He’d had girls, and he’d had his share of notoriety, but his fame was the kind granted to drop-outs, back-talkers, bathroom-smokers, and class-skippers. He hadn’t ever hated school, it was just that it had always felt like such a massive waste of time. Men were dying, his father’s men, in a war of outlaw against outlaw, and kids two desks over had been having meltdowns about who to ask to homecoming. Stupid, all of it. He’d known from the second he was old enough to say the word “bike” that he would be a Dog, like his father. Why the hell had he been spinning his wheels at Knoxville High?
He hadn’t finished, something Maggie had clapped him over the head with a wooden spoon about. But he hadn’t, and still didn’t care. He’d learned enough. He’d learned, on the fringes of a gym class locker room scuffle he’d eventually broken up, that Greg Hoffman was sensitive about his small frame and narrow features.
Greg hadn’t changed much, since that day in the locker room. Still small, his shiny new Carpathians cut swallowed him whole, leaving deep shadows where his shoulders should have filled out the leather. His hair was thin, that blonde that was almost translucent, buzzed close to his head. He hadn’t outgrown his knobby elbows or the faint scattering of pimples along his jaw. He looked about fifteen, and in the back corner booth at Stella’s, he looked scared to death.
Aidan spotted him straight off. First thing in the morning, on a late summer day like this, the patio was crowded and all the window tables were taken, customers waiting out on the sidewalk for a place to open up. Those three back booths by the kitchen weren’t anything to write home about, but that’s where Greg had chosen to sit, his back to the wall, facing the door. Conspicuous. Flying his colors like an idiot.
“Hey.” Tango’s elbow in his ribs drew Aidan’s attention. “Ava.”
Through the open glass door that led out onto the patio, he saw his sister sitting across from her little wimp-ass boyfriend.
“We’ll make it fast,” Aidan said. The last thing he needed was some country club shithead getting too curious about this meeting.
“Top of the morning, Gregory,” he said, just a hair too loud, as he slid in across from the Carpathian.
Greg jumped like he’d been electrocuted.
“How you been, man?” Aidan asked.
Tango spun a spare chair away from the wall, and straddled it at the edge of the table, effectively blocking Greg in place. He folded his arms over the chair back and cracked his gum, looking bored with the whole situation. “S’up?”
Greg glanced between the two of them, rattled, unsure of how to handle things.
Aidan leaned back against the booth, braced his hands in a casual way on the table, and said, “We’re old friends with Julian and Stella. No one’s gonna bug us in here. We can talk.”
“Just us,” Tango said, and plucked at his blue check flannel shirt, highlighting his lack of a cut. “No colors.”
Greg twitched, but he didn’t shed his cut. He dampened his lips, a movement that made him look extra ferret-faced. “My president knows I’m here.”
Aidan grinned – nice and big, lots of teeth showing – and glanced over at Tango to get a matching one in return. They’d played this scenario out so many times over the years – he might not be his father’s go-to guy, no, but he and Tango could circle like boxers with the best of them. Maybe, one of these days, Ghost would take note of that.
“So does mine,” he told Greg. “He says ‘hi’ by the way. Wants to know if you want to come to Sunday dinner. His old lady makes a mean pot roast.”
Greg coughed on a swift inhale. He didn’t like this jocular approach; he’d been all geared up for a fight.
“And the mashed potatoes,” Tango added. “Shit, if she wasn’t married to your old man, I’d get down on one knee over those potatoes.”
“Hey, that’s my stepmom you’re talking about.” Aidan kicked the side of his boot and earned a chuckle.
Greg had had enough. “What the hell do you guys want?”
Bingo. Thanks for joining the game, Greggy.
“A few things,” Aidan said, evasively, as a waitress appeared behind Tango. She was a redhead, about his sister’s age and she was taking note; her eyes skipped all over him and he thought she might have turned a little pink beneath the cute scattering of freckles on her nose. Oh, yeah, she saw him. “Coffee, cream and two sugars, sweetheart,” he said. “Him too.” Nod to Tango. “And, like, all the fresh muffins Stella’s got back there.”
She blushed and dimpled and walked away with one last glance.
Aidan let his grin linger as he faced Greg again. See how relaxed I am? I’m at home here. This is my place, my people. You don’t have any friends here. “First thing. Back in high school, you remember how we had Bio together?”
Greg’s face blanked a moment, some of the heated color bleeding away. Disarmed for the moment. “Yeah. You sat by the window and tapped on it and…”
“Told Ms. Schneider it was a bird,” they finished in unison.
Greg looked like he almost smiled. “That one day, right at the end of the semester…”
“The pigeon with the broken wing?” Aidan said.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, you didn’t have that class with me,” Aidan said to Tango. He explained the story, with all the embellishments and the old teenage excitement, of the afternoon when he’d clapped his palm against the window and exclaimed that a pigeon had flown into the glass, and lay injured on the sidewalk. Ms. Schneider had bolted out the side door, and shouting through the window, Aidan had directed her after the hobbling, crippled bird. She’d chased a non-existent pigeon around the green for thirty minutes, to the applause of his classmates who weren’t prepared for their pop quiz, and the days of detention had been worth it.
Greg was truly smiling by the time he finished the story, charmed again, like back in the day, and then the waitress was setting down thick ceramic mugs and heaping plates of steaming muffins: blueberry, cinnamon raisin, oatmeal, banana nut.
“It’s too early for anything pumpkin,” Tango lamented, reaching for a blueberry. “I could OD on pumpkin.”
Aidan was chewing a bite of chocolate chip muffin and reaching for his coffee when he said, “Greg, dude, you were a nice guy. How’d you end up with these losers?” He gestured to the Carpathians cut with his mug before he took a slug of coffee.
Greg looked like it hurt to swallow. He set his banana nut down on the plate and brushed the crumbs off his fingers.
“No, you should eat,” Aidan said. “I can afford to buy you breakfast and you look hungry.”
Greg’s expression was tortured as he reached for the muffin again, broke a crumble off with thumb and forefinger and studied it in the steam-curled morning light. “You guys” – fast dart of his pale eyes between them from half-lowered lids – “were the coolest guys in that whole school.”
Tango snorted. “I’m not sure about that.”
“We did alright,” Aidan said with a shrug. “Never got to be homecoming king or anything, but we got by.”
Greg shook his head and set the muffin bite down, eyes coming straight up to Aidan’s. “No, not like that. That’s just popular. I mean cool. Like, people were a little bit afraid, and you didn’t give a shit, and when Toby Smalls said you fucked Ms. Appleton in the teacher’s lounge, I believed him, because you were just…cool.”
Aidan chuckled. “I won’t confirm or deny that.”
“See?” Greg made a helpless gesture toward him. “You were just…are just…”
“Cool?”
“And the thing was,” Greg continued, “it wasn’t an act like it is with some guys, you know? The Lean Dogs – you were a part of them. A part of something that I…” He glanced away and shook his head, throat working as he swallowed.
“Greg, is this you saying you always wanted to be a Dog?”
He picked up a rolled packet of silverware and withdrew the fork, used it to maim his banana nut muffin. Quietly, he said, “I always wondered what it would be like to be a part of something bigger than I was.”
Aidan felt a small tug of sympathy for the guy. Small, plain, meek, Greg had been the butt of a hundred jokes, the target of so much bullying. He’d had to wonder something that Aidan had always known as fact: what was it like to have a family of brothers who always had your back? What did it mean to have that guaranteed love and support, that fraternal bond?
“You could have become a hangaround,” Aidan said. “Useful hangarounds get to prospect, loyal prospects get to patch in.”
Greg was shaking his head.
“It’s not about being cool or being big or any of that. It’s a brotherhood. It’s about loyalty.”
But Greg looked miserable, and said, “I couldn’t afford that. I had to get a job, I had to…well, it doesn’t matter now, because the rec center closed.”
“Old Man Milford’s,” Aidan said, comprehension dawning. He shared a glance with Tango and got a nod. “You worked at the pool hall.”
Small nod from Greg.
“And when the Carpathians took it over, they offered to let you join–”
The defensiveness came back full-force, crackling through Greg’s small arms, jerking him upright and firing in his eyes. He aimed his fork at Aidan, muffin crumbs scattering across the table. “I earned my place in the club.”
“Of course you did,” Tango said, soothingly.
But Aidan said, “Did they prospect you?”
Silence, which meant no, they hadn’t.
“Greg, nobody with half a brain just drops a patch on somebody’s back and expects him to stick around unless he can be assured of his loyalty. And, smart guy like you, I’m thinking that if someone strong-armed you out of a job, you’d find another job, not join up with them.”
Greg’s jaw clenched tight.
Aidan leaned over the table, dropping his voice. “What sort of leverage does Larsen have on you? What did he threaten you with?”
He tried to leave the table. He surged awkwardly to his feet, thumping his knees and struggling to slide out of the booth. Tango caught his wrist in a grip Aidan knew to be stronger than it looked. Greg struggled a second, then seemed to remember they were in a crowded café, and stilled. His eyes rolled wildly.
“Let go,” he hissed through his teeth.
“I could help you, Greg,” Aidan said, and earned a sneer for it. “No, listen. Whatever Larsen’s told you about the Dogs, use your head. You know us” – gesture between himself and Tango – “you went to school with us. I pulled Billy Mayfield off you in the locker room once. So whatever Larsen said, it’s bullshit. We can help you, Greg, if you’re willing to come talk to my dad about what you know.”
“You think I’m a rat?” Greg asked. “Is that it? Fuck you, Teague.”
Aidan sagged back against the booth. “Fine, but the offer stands, if you get clear-headed.”
Tango held fast to the guy’s wrist.
“One last thing,” Aidan said, tone conversational. He plucked a cinnamon raisin muffin from the plate and watched Greg from the corner of his eye. “You wouldn’t happen to know who stabbed Andre the other night, would you?”
Quick flicker of something deep in the man’s eyes. Guilt, but not for having done the deed himself. This was bystander guilt.
When he wouldn’t answer, Tango released him, and he clambered away from the table in a loud clomping of boots that drew other customers’ eyes. As he left, Tango slid into his abandoned seat across from Aidan and pushed his shades up into the front spikes of his hair.
“I smell a chink in Larsen’s armor,” he said, dragging his coffee mug over.
“Me too,” Aidan said. “We haven’t seen the last of Greg.”
The patio was crowded with people all talking a hundred miles an hour, that caffeinated spark lifting voices into bright bubbles of laughter that echoed off the water splashing in the fountain. Molten sunlight poured bright and heatless over the tables, glinting on china and glassware, flashing in high silver arcs as points were driven home with waves of forks and knives. Stella’s had all the old magic, and the food was delicious as always. Ava and Ronnie had a table right along the wrought iron patio railing, with a view of the alley; Ava flicked muffin crumbs into the gutter for the hopping English sparrows and felt her toes curl in abject delight to be back here.
Stella herself came out to see them, big white flour handprints on her black apron. She had grand twists of iron gray in her gorgeous raven hair these days, a smattering of crow’s feet and laugh lines, but her rich Italian complexion was still dark and beautiful, and the age markers added character.
“Julian told me,” she said, propping her fists on her wide hips, “that little Ava Rose was back and she had a gorgeous boy with her. And I said to him, ‘Why am I just hearing about it now?’ ” She wagged a finger at Ava. “You’re supposed to come see me immediately when you get back in town!”
Ava laughed. “I’m so, so sorry, Stella. It won’t happen again. This is Ronnie.” She gestured to him. “Ronnie, this is the best chef in all of east Tennessee.”
Stella rolled her eyes at the praise before she locked them on Ronnie. “You’re cute. How old are you? What do you do for a living? Do you make enough money to take care of this one?”
Ronnie turned hot pink and Ava glanced away to hide her smile…only for her gaze to collide with that of someone standing on the street.
A scrawny, pale-haired man in a too-large MC cut stood on the sidewalk, hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He looked to be frozen mid-stride, and he stared at her with what she could only call a dawning recognition; he was assessing her, eyes raking over her in a frank inventory that left her feeling exposed and a little bit violated. Like he was cataloguing her, taking down all the details in shorthand in his mind. She wanted to look away, but didn’t dare.
When he finally turned and set off down the alley, she caught a glimpse of the back of his cut: the Carpathians, Tennessee, the snarling werewolf.
She shuddered hard.
“Ava,” Ronnie said, and she snapped back to attention. “Yes?”
Stella was shaking her head, lips pursed. “Head in the clouds. You must really have it bad for this one.” She hooked a thumb at Ronnie. In a stage whisper, she said, “Good, because if you don’t want him, I might.”
“Um…” Ronnie couldn’t blush any deeper; it wasn’t possible.
Ava smiled and hoped it looked genuine. “I think I’ll hold onto him for now, Stella.”
“Suit yourself.” She threw up her hands and turned. “I’m back to my kitchen to slave the day away.”
“The muffins are amazing,” Ava called to her back, and earned an over-the-shoulder wave in acknowledgement. She turned to Ronnie, glad to find his color returning to normal. “So now you’ve met Stella.”
His brows lifted. “Every time I meet someone new, I’m even more convinced I’ve fallen into a Tennessee production of Our Town.”
“Ah. You get used to that feeling. It’s called being in Tennessee.”
He grinned. “I thought Georgia had prepared me for this.”
“And that’s where you went wrong.”
He lifted his fork again. “She can cook the hell out of breakfast, though, I’ll give her that.”
Ava nodded.
“Yo, sis.” Aidan’s shadow fell across their table before she registered his arms draping over the railing. “Taking your poodle for a walk this morning?” His shit-eating grin was reminiscent of all their childhood fights, and she didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or slap him.
“Funny, I was just about to ask Tango the same thing,” she said, grinning back, and saw Tango’s congratulatory smile over her brother’s shoulder.
“I didn’t miss you.” Aidan reached down and snagged a strip of bacon from her plate, folding it into his mouth. “So didn’t miss you.”
“Back at ya. So, what are you guys really doing here?” She shot him a pointed look. “I saw a lone wolf wandering around and thought maybe he was looking for you.”
Aidan’s smile tightened a fraction, a quick show of regret that she’d seen the Carpathian. “Yeah, maybe he was. But that’s not something you ought to worry about.”
The grin rebounded and he clapped Ronnie hard on the back. “You’ve got your guard-poodle to watch out for you.”
“Ass,” she accused.
“It’s a damn fine one, isn’t it?” He smacked himself as he turned to head down the sidewalk.
Ava sighed.
“Bye, hon,” Tango told her, a little rap of his knuckles on the railing in farewell.
“Bye, Kev.” She gave him a genuine smile. “Don’t let his fine ass blind you.”
He chuckled as he followed his friend.
When she glanced back at Ronnie, she said, “Our Town, huh?”
“Our Town on crack.”
The sound of a hand slapping down on the tool chest beside his left ear was like a grenade going off inside his head. Mercy ground his molars together and wasn’t surprised to find Aidan dropping down onto the wooden bench beside his work space.
“I’m curious,” Aidan said, pushing his shades into his curly hair, grinning, “how much alcohol it takes to get a six-five Cajun drunk enough to make a damn fool of himself in public.”
“Enough to put you under the table twice.”
“Don’t doubt it.” Aidan dug his pack of smokes from his cut pocket, but didn’t light up. He turned it in his hands, flicking the top, just to have something to do with his hands. “It’s Sunday,” he observed, nodding toward the bike Mercy worked on.
Mercy shrugged. “Not much else to do.”
Aidan’s face shifted, a subtle change in his energy that told Mercy this conversation wasn’t going to be as casual as it had seemed at first glance, and he wasn’t going to like it much. “The prospect said my sister and her boyfriend were there.”
Man, fuck that prospect. Mercy withdrew all his internal promises of support for the kid. “They might have been,” he said, off-hand, reaching for his wrench. “I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Aidan sighed, and sounded more like his father than he probably knew. “Merc.”
Mercy gave him the stare-down. “What?”
Unperturbed, Aidan returned the stare. “None of us like that snotrag boyfriend of hers, okay? But…she’s doing good these days.” For a second, his eyes were Ghost’s eyes. “You need to just leave her be, man.”
His mind went back to Friday night. She hadn’t even been in town twelve hours, and he’d laid hands on her. It was pretty fucked up if he thought about it.
He lifted his hands. “I am.” If there was a defensive bite to his voice, so be it. “You think I don’t have enough shit to worry about?”
“I think I misjudged you, five years ago,” Aidan said, levelly. “And I won’t make that mistake again.”
Mercy watched him rise and walk away, stunned.
Wherever she was, whichever city or state, whatever mood she was in, there was nothing like a book store to fill her up with happiness. Her favorite in Knoxville was Fourth Down, a tiny, cramped shop that boasted selling second-, third- , and fourthhand books of all genres, just around the corner from the university, the wall behind the register hosting a huge, artistic shot of Neyland. In this shop, she didn’t have to slog through the double-spaced, fast-read novels that leapt off the center displays in the chain bookstores. Here was where she found fat paperbacks with curling covers, cramped print, and coffee stains on the edges of the pages. Here were her favorites from the nineties, the lyrical novels that redefined genres. Here was where she stumbled across faded hardbacks with handwritten dedications in the fronts, that collection of Kipling poems dedicated to Martha, dated 1917. Fourth Down smelled of ink and dusty paper, collapsing bindings and musty cardboard covers. Dust motes swirled in big sprightly columns in the narrow shafts of sunlight that came in through the high windows. It was a magic place: books on shelves, on stools, in stacks on the floor, spread out in heaps on tables, piled to the ceiling between the windows. Shopping here always brought to mind the scene from Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf digging through scrolls at Minis Tirith.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked, voice dreamy, as she floated down an aisle and passed a finger along the spines of the books.
Ronnie followed a few steps behind. “It smells like–”
“Heaven?”
“Old people, I was gonna say.” He made a laughing sound in his throat. “You really do love books, don’t you?”
She sighed to herself. Once upon a time, she hadn’t ever had to explain that to her man. Once upon a time, she’d been stupid.
She turned, and found Ronnie staring at his phone, head down, completely unenthusiastic about the wall-to-wall books around them.
Ava resumed her walk, leaving him to Twitter or Facebook or whatever the hell had held him captive since they’d arrived in Knoxville. In a small, back part of her mind, she knew she should have been worried that he was texting another girl, that he was running around on her. But the realization that she didn’t care if he was – that was overpowering. That propelled her down the aisle, deeper into her haven of books.
She was in the mood for something dark and Gothic, some tale peopled by steep-roofed houses and ominous cloud cover. What she got instead was a near-collision with a dark-haired young man studying the paperbacks laid out on a table the next aisle over. He glanced up at the muffled sound of her heels on the old carpet, and her heart lurched up her throat.
He had long since lost the shine of health and popularity, was thin, pale, and smudged under the eyes, but Mason Stephens Jr. still cut a rich-boy figure in his J. Crew and khakis, his hair long on top and parted on the side, carefully combed down with paste.
Unlike her, he didn’t evidence surprise at their sudden meeting. His eyes fastened to her in the way she remembered and hated, and a slow smile spread across his lips that brought up all the old repulsion, like her breakfast was trying to make a break for it.
“Teague,” he said, voice still oily, that little taunt, like he had a secret he wouldn’t share. “Look at you, all grown up.”
She cast a furtive glance down at her outfit, the skinny jeans, elbow-sleeve sweater, and the high-heeled sandals Ronnie said he liked best. Straight out of a Macy’s catalogue, all of it, with her hair in tidy dark waves down her shoulders and just a hint of lip gloss. She knew she didn’t look like the girl Mason had threatened to rape in Hamilton House five years ago. She knew she looked weaker than that.
The nausea doubled, the salty saliva flowing beneath her tongue. Her stomach cramped and her pulse accelerated; the fine hairs on her arms prickled and she felt the first blush of panicked sweat at her throat and breasts. It was like her body remembered him, what he had done to it, and it was telling her to run, run, run!
But she lifted her chin and said, “Did you learn how to read since I saw you last?”
“Ooh.” He mimed fear, hands raised. “Kitty’s still got claws.”
Five years ago, when he’d finally been released from the hospital, Mason had transferred to a private school and Ava hadn’t so much as passed him on the street afterward. Ghost made it clear that he and Stephens Sr. had come to some sort of arrangement: she and Mason would be kept apart, and everyone would pretend that night in Hamilton House had never happened. Ava hadn’t thought to run into him here, like this. She’d figured he was married, or in rehab, or living in Aruba by now. What would someone with Mason’s wealth and contempt want with Knoxville at this point?
She didn’t know, but she didn’t have the stomach for him. Time, it turned out, didn’t heal all wounds or assuage all hatreds.
Ava turned, to go back the way she’d come, when Mason said, “Did you hear my father’s the mayor?”
Let it go, her common sense told her. Just keep walking.
But she glanced over her shoulder and said, “Finally? Hasn’t he been running for some kind of office for twenty years? Guess it’s true what the old story says: the slow one always wins the race…eventually.”
Mason remained as unflappable as ever, still grinning. “Well, sugar, I hope you went away to law school, because your Little Doggies are about to be in major fucking trouble. It’d take a miracle to keep the lot of them out of jail.”
“Mason, Mason,” she said, clucking her tongue. Inside, she was shaking, but she said, “You keep threatening that. How ‘bout you deliver or shut the hell up already.”
When she pulled her head around, Ronnie was standing in front of her, phone forgotten for the moment in one hand, his gaze trained on Mason, mouth plucked sideways in a frown. “What’s going on? Is this guy bothering you?”
“He’s always bothering someone.” Ava grabbed the front of his shirt and steered him back around the aisle. “Guess it was my lucky turn,” she said, loud enough for Mason to hear, and kept urging Ronnie back toward the exit.
Once they were in the next aisle, she snatched up Ronnie’s hand. “Come on.” And she towed him along after her, nearly jogging by the time she pushed through the door and out onto the sidewalk.
She didn’t stop until they were two shops down, and then she collapsed onto the bench in front of the ice cream parlor, panting, trembling, clutching her knees to keep her hands steady as she leaned forward and fought the awful tide of nausea.
“Ava. Hey, hey.” Ronnie dropped down next to her and laid his had in the middle of her back. “What’s wrong? What did he say to you?”
She shook her head, choking on her gag reflex. “Nothing. Nothing, he – that’s the mayor’s son.”
His fingers flexed, back and forth, a light massage against the ridge of her spine. “Stephens?”
“Mason Stephens Jr.” She gulped in a deep breath of air, flavored faintly with waffle cone sweetness. If she breathed through her nose, she could smell chocolate, rich creamy ice cream, low tang of mint. It was helping, somehow, the clean fresh scent of the ice cream. “He…oh, shit, nevermind.” She sat up and leaned back against the bench; the street wavered in front of her a moment as her equilibrium shifted.
Ronnie was studying her with a concerned notch between his brows, lower lip caught between his teeth. “Ava, for the love of God, what is going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit,” he said, gently. “Look, you don’t want to hear this, but I could tell, before we came here – I could tell all along – that you’ve got…some skeletons. I could tell that. You’re careful. You were nervous with me.”
She shot him a hateful, sideways glance, but he pressed on.
“And that has never bothered me, I swear. But when we got to Knoxville, you changed. You got more careful, more nervous. I feel like we’re going backward here. I know something happened to you, and I know it was pretty bad to shake you up like this. And I want to help you, but I can’t do that unless you talk to me.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“It may be your decision to tell me, but it’s my decision whether I want to know, and I do.”
She sighed, exhausted now.
“Ava, please.”
She regarded him a long moment, the story pushing at the base of her throat, studying the deep confusion in his expression.
She would tell him some of it, she decided, because she was at the end of her rope with not-telling. The parts that were safe to tell. The parts that were about Mason, and Ainsley Millcott, and being a kid who was different.
The parts with Mercy, though, she’d keep to herself. Because even if she loathed the man now, she would never allow someone like Ronnie into those sun-warmed moments in her room, with nothing but innocence and trust between her and the man she’d loved more than anything.
That was when, sitting in front of the ice cream parlor, she knew that she’d never love Ronnie, and that there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.