“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry for that. I don’t have a good reason.”
“I would disagree,” Connor said.
It was painfully obvious that he was trying so hard to dance around what had happened. And in some respects, I didn’t blame him at all. I didn’t want to revisit what had happened unless necessary either.
“Can we get my car inside?” I said. “And then let’s talk. I’m not in a rush to go anywhere.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, sure.”
It was amusing to see Connor like this. Time may have made him look meaner and tougher, but I still saw him as the awkward teenager who just needed someone to care for him.
* * *
We sat in the “office” of the repair shop, which was more like a walk-in closet. There was a single desk, which Connor sat behind, while I sat in a chair across from him. I probably couldn’t have backed up the chair a single inch.
Outside the office, Mason handled the repairs on my car. When we’d pass each other, we exchanged looks of curiosity. I didn’t want to sound mean, but Mason and I just never ran in the same circles before. I had no reason to know him well—even when he was close with the boys, he always kept a sort of aloofness and distance, like the big brother who’d been abandoned by his own circle.
But after all this time, I yearned to know more about him.
For now, though, Connor.
“So, can I ask…whathaveyou been doing the past decade?”
I smiled and nodded.
“You can ask anything, Connor,” I said, knowing full well he would not. “For the first couple of years after everything happened, I just went recluse. Even up until recently, I was still very cautious about going outside. But I just decided I wasn’t going to live that life anymore, you know?”
“You picked a hell of a fucking time,” Connor said. “I’ve never seen tension so high in this town.”
He swallowed.
“We killed two of them, Rachel. There’s just one left.”
He didn’t need to elaborate on who “them” were. I knew immediately. I could see it in those eyes of his.
“It’s been our mission since that night happened to bring you justice,” Connor said. “Maybe for our own selfish reasons, I don’t know if this makes any difference to you or not. I hope it does. But we’ve killed Derek and Damian. Just Eduardo remains.”
Unfortunately, I knew who all three were from that night. I remembered who led the three of them. I remember which ones mostly held down Brock and forced him to watch, and I knew which one had violated me the most.
In the case of who had taken my dignity from me, it was Eduardo. The one most responsible for the pain in my life still lived, still walked this Earth. And…
I didn’t know how to feel about it.
On the one hand, I didn’t want to wish death on anyone, even those who had committed the most heinous of crimes. But on the other hand, that man had taken more than just Brock from me. He’d taken away my spirit. He’d takeneverythingaway from me, and even though the incident only lasted a few minutes, the effects still remained with me.
Maybe I did want them to die. Or at least suffer a bit.
But for all the work I’d done on myself…
“I don’t know, Connor,” I said, looking down at my hands in my lap.
Connor didn’t say a word. An awkward silence fell over the room. That was what tended to happen when you’d gone nearly a decade as close friends and hadn’t gotten to know each other at all in the time since. The boy who was slowly morphing into a man had now morphed completely into a brutal fighter—and was it for the best?
“How have things been for you?” I said. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Actually, yes,” Connor said.
He didn’t smile, but the tone lifted in his voice, and even back in the day, him raising his tone would have been the equivalent to most other people of a smile.
