“I bet she does,” I murmured.
She ruffled her hair again, and now it was borderline wild. “I started seeing someone last summer. ‘Seeing’ probably isn’t the right word. It’s more like scheduled sex. Really, really incredible sex.” She looked up, disoriented. “I can’t believe I just said that out loud.”
“Keep going,” I said. If she could demand the details of my relationship, I could ask the same.
“So, this all has been occurring,” she said primly. “And I’ve been trying to maintain everything else, but I haven’t been able to. I keep thinking that I should have been there for Sam when your relationship ended, but instead I was six states away for scheduled sex. I was supposed to be ending it, but . . . that didn’t go as planned.”
“Do you swoop in when all your brothers’ relationships end?”
She lifted a shoulder and sipped her coffee. “My brothers don’t have many relationships. Patrick kept his a secret for months. Matt holds me at a distance. Riley’s still a toddler in my eyes. And Sam . . . well, Sam changed this year, and I didn’t notice. I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t there, and I let him down.”
“But the sex? It was decent?”
She blushed—hard—and pressed her fist to her mouth to cover a huge smile. “I haven’t been able to get on a bike for spin class since.” She laughed, but the happiness was gone. “If I’m not taking care of my brothers, I don’t know who I am anymore.”
I drained my cappuccino and shifted in my seat, hoping I could make an exit. I didn’t have the right words for her, and it wasn’t like I’d ever see her again.
“May I ask what happened? With you and Sam?” Shannon said.
She cared about him, and I appreciated it deeply because I’d dedicated the past few months to disliking her. That didn’t mean I was rehashing anything. “I hope he finds what he’s looking for, wherever he is.”
It sounded pretty and tidy that way, but in reality it was a gigantic fucking mess.
Shannon frowned, clearly hoping for more, and that was my cue to leave. I gathered my things and dropped some cash on the table.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” I said. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing. I hope it gets easier.”
I turned away from the table, and Shannon said, “When he figures it all out and comes back, give him a chance. Please don’t turn him away. He’s so much more sensitive than he likes us to believe.”
I pivoted, staring at her for a long minute. “Shannon, I know exactly how sensitive he is. You don’t need to tell me that.”
And I know how to love him,I thought.
A FEW DAYS—maybe even a week—alone was nice. Calming. Restful.
A month alone was a purge and cleanse.
Two months alone was the most arduous experience of my life. I fished and hiked and read, but through it all, I couldn’t escape my thoughts.
My hurt quickly tripped over into anger, and from there, I lingered in rage for too many days to count. I yelled at the trees, chucked so many stones into the river that my shoulder ached for a week, stomped up snow-covered mountains until my legs felt like noodles, chopped enough wood to heat most of Nova Scotia for the winter.
It took a fish to pull me out of that rage.
It was a beautiful striped bass, and it bit on my line during the type of fiery sunrise that warned sailors back to the shore. When I had it secured in the ice chest, I powered up the outboard motor and steered the boat toward the bay. I was fifteen minutes from land when the skies opened, letting loose torrential freezing rain mixed with hail and thundersnow, and there was nothing for me to do but ride it out.
I was shivering and soaked when I docked, but if I didn’t prepare the bass soon, it would spoil. Despite the heavy, wet snow, I jogged to the cleaning station downstream from the cabin and set to gutting the fish. Lightning struck no more than fifty yards away, zapping a low bush and singeing everything within a narrow radius. I jolted and my concentration faltered, and instead of stripping the fish’s innards, I drove my knife into my thigh.
Cold, wet, and bleeding, I dropped to the ground and cursed every corner of the universe. Sitting on that rocky Maine beach in early March, my hands wrapped around my leg, I hatedeverything.There was nothing left to celebrate, to love, to desire, and I was so fucking mad at the world.
I wanted it to be someone’s fault. I wantedeverythingto be someone’s fault and I wanted to forward my fury toward that person.
But all of that was futile.
Regardless of how much anger I was cultivating, I was still alone, bleeding all over myself while I cried in the snow, and nothing was going to change unless I dragged my ass off that beach. I was the only one who could release that rage and free myself from all of it. I was the only one who could clean up after my mess.
So I got up. It hurt like hell and I was certain I’d ground oyster shell shards and fish guts into my exposed flesh in the process, but I didn’t let that panic slow me. I got up and I put one limping foot in front of the other.
I called out—it was probably closer to a prissy yelp—when hail struck my shoulder head-on. If I hadn’t already scared off the area bears with my routine hollering, they would have been running for the hills.
