“I’m not a Zen guy,” he said.
“Yeah. I’m not a Zen woman, but it worked for me. If it’s too annoying, you can sit on this hard wooden bench to talk.”
“You make it sound so inviting.” This light back-and-forth with Nadine was helping him calm down.
The rake made a pleasant sound as he dragged it through the gravel. He cleared her steps with a single long pull, then traced lines between the rocks. It was a while before he spoke.
“Tyler lied and said I asked him to run the story. That I begged him so I could get another shot at the I-team.”
He looked up to check Nadine’s reaction. She looked like she was breathing fire. He’d never had someone react like that on his behalf.
He liked it.
It didn’t take long to recount the conversation, and if she was angry before he started, now she was incandescent. “I will kill him,” she said.
Wes paused midrake. “I am trying to achieve my Zen, and your threats of violence are interfering.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No.” He raked some more. Fantasizing about Tyler and Jason meeting an appropriate comeuppance might not be approved of in the tenets of Zen Buddhism—or maybe it was, he didn’t know—but it was certainly gratifying.
“This is so unfair,” she said, kicking at the pebbles. “Oh, sorry.”
He raked over them. “Again, not helping me achieve Zen, but yeah. It is.”
“What a couple of assholes. How does Tyler sleep at night?” She sounded truly flummoxed by how he could find peace. “I think he sabotaged you.”
“Me?” He stopped raking to look over at Nadine. “Why?”
“Because if you were on that team, you’d blow him out of the water. I bet that’s why he added your name as a contributor. He’d take the credit if it worked out, but you could be the scapegoat if he needed one.”
Wes’s chest filled when he saw she believed what she said. She thought he was good at his job. It gave him a boost that was instantly extinguished when he remembered theSpeardidn’t agree, and theSpearhad been the one signing his paychecks.
“I shouldn’t have…”
Nadine crunched over to stop him with a hard hug. “No. That won’t get us anywhere.”
“I can’t get over the what-ifs.” He buried his face in her neck, rake in hand. “What if I hadn’t left my notes there? What if I’d used Word, for God’s sake?”
“Wes.” Nadine extracted herself to look him straight in the face. “What if this, what if that. I wrecked myself with them too, but what’s the point? What if I never ran that obit? What if we never took this job from Brent? What if Tyler wasn’t a total piece of shit? Go back far enough, what if John Wilson had been decent and Dot never wroteThirty Pieces?”
“I guess so,” said Wes.
“Everything in life is a result of a what-if. Remember what Dot said?”
“She said a lot of things.”
“She said the bad stuff in her life eventually opened the way for good stuff.” Nadine frowned. “But more eloquently and about flags.”
“‘Golden threads of possibility knitting into that moment, readying themselves to be unfurled like flags,’” Wes recited.
“That was it.” She leaned into him. “I got the gist of it, even without a photographic memory.”
“You did.” He saw Nadine chewing her lip. “What are you thinking?”
“That we failed Dot,” she admitted. “We didn’t tell her story. We let the aggressor play the victim.”
“No way.” Wes thumped the rake on the ground. He had a flush of energy that was almost entirely composed of resentment toward theSpear. “We’re going back to that hunt right now.”
