He looked exhausted and like he was going to go for a drink the minute he left here. Boyd was still angry, but that didn’t stop the reflexive jab of worry. After a second he folded up his anger and the itch of resentment and tucked it away for later. Right now it didn’t look as though Shay needed anyone else on his case.
“You look like hell,” he said as he walked over.
Shay looked up from his knees and twisted his mouth into a humorless smile. There was a fresh stitch in his eyebrow and dried blood on his eyelid.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t pretty,” he said. “She’d been drinking when… whoever it was called. By the time she called me and I got there, she’d had time to come up with all sorts of ideas. She was hysterical, paranoid. More drunk. Already.”
Boyd reached up to tap his eyebrow. “And that?”
Shay started to mirror the gesture but caught himself before he poked at the raw skin. “I tried to stop her from getting in her truck, and I caught it on the edge of the door.”
That could be true. Or it could have been from the class ring Mrs. Calloway always wore, the one Sammy’s dad had given her, or from a heavy glass tumbler slung in drunken frustration. But it was probably the car door. That was always the culprit back when things were bad.
“Mac?”
Shay grazed his finger over his temple. He shifted to the side and nodded to one of the closed doors in the hallway.
“The good captain is in there,” he said. “Trying to talk my still-pissed and pissed-off mother out of going to the tabloids with her story of how the three of us…. I don’t know. Some of her theories are worse than others, but none of them are what you want your mom to think about you.”
“She doesn’t mean it,” Boyd said. He shifted uncomfortably in place for a second and then gingerly took a perch on the chair next to Shay. The flowers ended up across his thighs. “She won’t mean it.”
Shay leaned back and tipped his head against the wall. The muscles in his jaw worked under the skin.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I think, maybe, there’s some things you can only take back once, you know?”
“We should have told her.”
“Yeah,” Shay slowly rasped out. He worked his jaw from one side to the other to make it pop and kept his eyes on the cracked ceiling. “We should have. Except, you know, it wasn’twe, was it? Because I don’t remember any of you asking me to cast a vote.”
Boyd had thought there was a truce. He was wrong. The discovery left him wrong-footed as he scrabbled for the self-righteous high ground he’d hung on to on the long drive back.
“The DNA came back—”
“I don’t care. You shouldn’t have brought him back here,” Shay snapped. He lurched out of the chair and stalked away two steps as he dragged one hand down his face. “People buy cheek swabs on the street. They get other people to do piss tests. He’s not my brother.”
“You don’t know that,” Boyd retorted. He set the flowers aside as he stood up, unwilling to be loomed over. “And what were we supposed to do, just ignore it? Ignore him?”
“Yes,” Shay said, frustrated, as though that answer should be obvious. “What good did it do, bringing him here? What could it have possibly accomplished except this? You should have buried it. He should have never come here.”
The anger that Boyd had banked finally bubbled up. He took a step into Shay’s space and glared at him. Shay was taller than Boyd but shorter than Morgan.
“And if you’d been sober, that would have been your call to make,” Boyd said flatly. He could feel the high ground slip through his fingers, but right then, he didn’t care. “Or at least you’d have had your say. But you weren’t, so I did it instead.”
Red striped Shay’s cheekbones, dull and hot under his tan as he curled his lip. “Of course you did, Boyd Maccabee, the Boy That Got Home. Forget Sullivan. Who the hell would you be without my family’s tragedy, huh? What would youhaveif everyone in town didn’t pity you?” He gave Boyd’s shoulder a rough shove that knocked him back a step. “You four-eyed little shit.”
It was ridiculous. Childish as hell. Yet the jeer still slid home through Boyd’s defenses and gouged at something raw and vulnerable in there. He’d wondered that before, but he hadn’t thought anyone else had the same questions.
He shoved Shay back with both hands, and the impact made Shay stagger. Shay might be taller than Boyd, but he didn’t need to deadlift a human body to train for his job.
“At least I didn’t run away and join the army,” he said. “You think no one noticed that you never came back to town all those years?”
Shay grabbed him by the collar and yanked him forward, his knuckles digging in under Boyd’s jaw. His eyes were wet and tears were caught on his lashes, and maybe once Boyd wasn’t so pissed off, he’d care about that.
“You really think this is about you?” Shay said through gritted teeth. “It was stillmybrother who disappeared. It wasmyfamily that didn’t exist anymore. You were just some kid he hung out with because you had a cool dad. If none of this had happened, he’d have found new friends by now, forgotten about you. So next time you want to fuck everything up for me, how about you don’t.”
He let go of Boyd’s collar and tried to shoulder him out of the way as he stalked off down the corridor. Boyd tackled him before he could go more than a few paces. His shoulder hit Shay just under the armpit, hard enough to jar a grunt out of him, and they went down with a thud on the floor in a tangle of clumsily thrown punches and swearwords.
“Asshole.”
