I
Kilauea Lava Fields and King Tides
Chapter One
Erin
Two yearsago
I blamedit on the seven-year itch.
Or something like that.
That's what it was—seven angry, necessary, devastating, silent, healing, amazing, awful years.
Was it still considered home if you avoided it like plagues and pestilence?
I didn't know if Boston still qualified asmyhome—and by that logic, was anywhere my home?—but I was tucked into the only available seat on the midnight flight out of Rome and headed there now.
I'd waited until the last minute to make the call, book the flight, pack the bag. It was ridiculous, considering I never truly entertained the idea of missing Matt's wedding. I wouldn't missanyof my siblings' weddings, but Matt, he was a special one.
Between the six of us, there were always factions. The oldests, the youngests, the boys, the girls, the good ones, the smart ones, the strange ones, the wild ones, the bad ones.
Or, as it often went down with our little tribe, the badone.
That was me, but Matt didn't seem to mind. When my world condensed down to three little lines and there was nowhere for me to go, Matt put my pieces back together. He was the buffer between me and the rest of my family, and he helped me get away when I needed it the most.
So, yeah. I was going to his wedding even if I had to smile, nod, and panic-sweat my way through the entire fucking weekend.
It helped that my father had finally found his true calling. We could all breathe easier knowing he was now busy managing day-to-day operations in hell. Some would say it was wrong to disrespect the dead, but I'd say his inability to respect the living was the greater crime.
But itwaseasier to breathe with him gone. It was slow at first, no magical moonbeams of serenity here, and then it came down on me all at once. When I shook it off like a cloak I'd long since outgrown, I was left with a cold slap of reality.
I was completely fucking alone.
In my haste to run far and fast from Angus, I'd also shredded the threads that tied me and my siblings together. Little more than a trail of burnt bridges and breadcrumbs led the way to the only people I could call my own.
And in those seven angry, necessary, devastating, silent, healing, amazing, awful years, everything had changed. We'd grown up. We'd grown apart, or perhaps it was me who grew apart from them.They'dgrown closer together; my siblings ran a third-generation sustainable preservation architecture firm in Boston. They worked together. They shared holidays, memories, milestones. They even ran the goddamn Boston Marathon every spring.
They were a unit, and I was the outlier.
This journey home was saddled with histories and high-water marks, and a quiet, bitter war with my sister. There was no minor disagreement keeping the ice cold between me and Shannon. Ours was a standoff, and while no one was fully on the side of right, many of the wrongs belonged to me.
The drumbeat of reconciliation had intensified since Angus's death, but it'd started long before that. Matt wanted to broker peace. Patrick was tired of my perennial position on his weekly to-do list. Sam was eager for anyone but him to be the source of our collective hand-wringing. Riley enjoyed reminding me that the only way to get the ball out of my court was to serve it back to Shannon.
No matter which way I cut it, my brothers were walking away from the watchtower. They weren't willing to abet this impasse any longer, and if I knew them at all, I knew they were jostling Shannon in the same way.
* * *
Gettingout of Terminal E at Logan International was a shitshow. The andesite in my bag raised suspicions in Customs, even when I explained it was a volcanic rock straight from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. They stood down when I produced my badge from the last International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics conference, but they weren't thrilled when they came across my rock hammers and chisels.
Nothing shook the jet lag quite like the heavily armed attention of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.
The rest of my evening was similarly complicated.
While the car service that Matt had ordered was smart enough to send a driver uninterested in idle chatter, they failed to send adequate directions to the Cape Cod inn along with him. After driving in circles for forty-five minutes, Rocco and I stopped for frappés at one of those quaint ice cream stands that dotted New England roadsides every summer. We got directions, too.
I'd hoped to quietly arrive at the inn, sneak off to my room, and gird myself before diving into the deep end tomorrow morning. That would've worked if Patrick hadn't been pacing at the entrance while glancing at his watch, then checking his phone, and then scanning the parking lot. He'd claimed he was waiting for me, and I would've believed that if he hadn't continued on with that precise sequence of events. Always a secretive one, that Patrick.
