“Why are you such a good kid?” Something I say on instinct, something I used to say all the time. Only Margot’s not a kid anymore. And neither am I. “Come on, I’m starving. Haven’t cooked in a non-communal kitchen in too fucking long.”
* * *
Margot’s house faces this endless stretch of wilderness. I know it’s not endless, and it’s not really wild either. The highway’s just on the other side.
But it has this feral feeling, and the whispering grass dips and folds in on itself, the landscape pocked with dangerous clefts that will trip you up and knock you down, snap your ankles if you’re not careful where you step. There are knots of vegetation out there, little copses of gnarled, wind-twisted trees. From here on her back lawn they look like open mouths.
“I saw a wolf out there once.” Margot closes the slider with her hip and passes me a cup of coffee. I take a sip and grimace. “Sorry, too strong? I topped it off.” She gives me a devious smile and takes a deep draught of her own no doubt heavily-spiked coffee. “I still have Dad’s rifles in the safe. My neighbor has cats, and she said she found one out here, like two weeks ago, just gutted. Blood everywhere.”
“That’ll happen,” I say. “It’s a coyote anyway. No wolves here.”
“I know the fucking difference, it was a wolf.” She raises her eyebrows, daring me to argue, and I laugh. “God, I hate myself. I even missed that—how fucking egotistical you are.”
“I’m not egotistical. I’m just always right.”
She laughs, and the sound breaks me. “I use them sometimes.”
I look at her quizzically.
“The rifles, I mean.” She hesitates, worrying a loose thread in the knee of her jeans. “I got my license.”
That surprises me. It’s not that Margot is anti-gun or violence or anything, it’s more that after Milo… “You practice?”
She lifts her shoulder, a half-shrug. I understand that it means she doesn’t want to say anything else on it. I don’t press the issue.
We sit in companionable silence a while, the day maturing into afternoon, the soft pale light going syrupy and tangerine before the clouds close back in and sop it all up. Autumn’s deepening, and the nights are coming faster now, the darkness determined.
“You’re gonna go back to it,” Margot finally says. “Aren’t you?”
I look at her, truly look at her, study the stiffness in her shoulders, the waver in her voice. This isn’t a woman who’s going to accept lies, and she doesn’t deserve them. “Yeah,” I say. “I am.”
She nods, like she’s known this a long time, even though we haven’t talked about it.Twins, I think, almost wistfully.But not quite.There are thoughts in my head Margot doesn’t need to know. Burdens she doesn’t need to bear.
Vendettas she doesn’t need to share.
“Jockey,” she says, after another minute. “He skipped town. He’s one over, up the highway by the city now. Running with the guys that came after you that night.” She looks at me, those bright eyes suddenly filled with fear. “You’re gonna go after him. Aren’t you?”
I hesitate, then nod.
“For Milo?” Her eyes shine with tears as she speaks his name. He was her friend too. Family, practically. And unlike me, his kind of gone isn’t the kind you come back from after three years.
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” She closes her eyes and runs her sleeve under them, blotting her tears and quickly shaking the grief away. “I knew you were going to, I just…”
“Hoped I wouldn’t?” I finish my coffee, savoring the bitter slap of whiskey clinging in the dregs. “You know I have to.”
“Liam…” Margot takes a long breath, then releases it, her expression going stony. “OK.”
“OK?”
“How can I help?”
I smile at her. That valiance, that unselfishness, it reminds me of Dad. I see him in her too, in those huge eyes and that reluctant half-smile. I hope she sees him in me.
I sigh and lean back in my chair, letting the cold breeze cut right through my shirt. It feels cleansing, tempering, like hot steel plunged into water. “I’ll take a few days,” I say, and feel some of Margot’s fear leach out of the air. “Get my shit together, do some clerical work, you know. I can’t use those guns, you know, Dad’s. I don’t have a license anymore.”
Margot watches me, steel in her expression. “I know.”
