I raise my eyebrows in genuine curiosity. “How so, if I may ask.”
“Oh, her folks were dirt poor, plain awful people. Her daddy left when she was just a little girl. Her momma loved the bottle more than anything else. All Sheila had was the boy next door. Perry was his name, I think.”
“I’m sorry she had to go through that. I just don’t think it’s an excuse for bad behavior.”
Bill chuckles lightly. “I agree with you there. I also reckon that a lot of her bad behavior she learned from that Perry boy. He’s the one who got her into dancing and hard drugs at one point, anything to numb the pain, I guess.”
“Sounds to me like she had terrible influence in her earliestyears.”
“What else could she have learned from a guy who celebrated his eighteenth birthday by getting a snake heart tattoo on his wrist before he ended up in jail for a drunk and disorderly? But Sheila came a long way from those troubled times. When she met James Madison, she was already clean, applying for college. When we met, she was the closest thing to a goddess I’d ever seen.”
A goddess? Not the word I would’ve used, but I won’t fault a man for being in love.
What does persist like an echo in my head is the snake heart tattoo William mentioned. Somewhere in the darkest corner of my mind, a faint memory rises, a glimpse of a snake heart tattoo. I’ve seen one before, up close, not that long ago, peeking out of a white sleeve.
The hand was holding a plate.
I can almost smell the shrimp, the sauce.
“Oh, God,” I whisper, breaking into a cold sweat.
William gives me a worried look. “Are you okay, kiddo?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you so much for this whole talk. It really helped put things into perspective,” I say and get up. “I just need to talk to the guys now, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he says, sounding hopeful.
However, I don’t leave his room to talk to the Morgan brothers about getting back together. No, there’s something else, something urgent and terrifying and disturbing as hell I need to discuss with them.
“What’s wrong? Is Dad okay?” Cole asks, quickly noticing my anxiety.
“Yes. Sorry. He’s good. He’s fine. I just remembered something.”
The more I think about it, the more missing pieces of the same puzzle return to the surface of my conscious mind, things I heard in conversation a long time ago. Terrence told me about the snake heart guy. I remember now. His mother’s first boyfriend, her true love, she called him.
21
COLE
The look on Willow’s face unsettles me.
From the moment she walked into Dad’s hospital room, I felt like something was different about her. That’s the trouble with good, honest women. They’re terrible at keeping secrets, at telling lies. She’s the complete opposite of me, in that sense. Maybe it’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to her from the moment we met.
“What is it?” Asher asks.
“I haven’t put it all together yet, and I think I might have some memories jumbled up in my mind,” Willow says, half smiling as she points to her temple. “It’s been a crazy couple of months, I guess. But Bill said something in there about Sheila’s past.”
Toby frowns and moves closer. To my relief, she doesn’t recoil or pull away. I take it as an encouraging sign that maybe, just maybe, all isn’t lost between us. There’s still a chance for us to bring her back.
“Give us the jumbled pieces then. We might be able to put them together,” Toby says. “What’s this about, exactly?”
“Bill mentioned Sheila’s first love. He was trying to tell me she had it rough growing up,” Willow replies. “But what really caught my attention was the snake heart tattoo the guy supposedly had on his wrist. I guess it stood out.”
I shake my head slowly. “Why are we revisiting Sheila’s past?”
“Because somewhere in my mind, completely disconnected, is the memory of a snake heart tattoo emerging from a white sleeve,” she says.
My stomach drops, and my mind starts racing. “I can’t put a finger on it. I can’t even precisely say where I saw it. Maybe it was at a different event, maybe it was at Terrence and Katrina’s wedding. I didn’t pay that much attention to the details.”
