“My dad’s a cop,” I said. “My brother too. They just about lost their shit when I got kicked out of the bureau.”
“But that was a while ago right? They didn’t get over it?”
“My dad fucking dreamed of Nathan and me getting into the FBI. Nathan didn’t make the cut to the academy so he joined the police force under my dad. Law enforcement isn’t a job for them. It’s a calling.” I hesitated, trying to think of a way to explain the distance that can grow between people who love each other, people who want the best for each other. Trying to think of a way to explain how you could go months or even years without talking until you felt like strangers. “We stayed in touch at first —holidays, birthdays, that kind of thing — but after a while we got tired of fighting, and then we got tired of trying to talkwithoutfighting. So we didn’t talk at all.”
“Do they know what you do for a living?” Cassie asked.
I laughed. “They’d turn me in so fast I wouldn’t even have time to grab my shoes.”
She was quiet for a minute and I knew what she was thinking: how did a former FBI agent, the son of a cop, end up robbing banks?
“And your mom?”
“Died when I was twelve.” I had a flash of my mom’s face: smiling and gentle, dark hair falling over one cheek as she bent to brush a tear from my face. My memories of her got blurrier around the edges every year. “Cancer.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that,” Cassie said. “All this time I’ve been talking about my dead parents, and you knew exactly how I felt because you’d been through it too.”
I squeezed her tighter. “It’s not something I talk about. For a long time I hated cancer — for a while I even hated my mom forgettingcancer — but eventually I understood.”
She looked up at me. “Understood what?”
“Life is mostly random. Shit happens and it happens in all kinds of ways you don’t expect. A lot of it is bad shit you don’t deserve, but every now and then you get lucky and get some good shit you don’t deserve too.”
Like her. She was the good shit I didn’t deserve.
She grew quiet again, probably thinking about my cynical view on life.
“You named one of your birds after a war god and the other after a goddess of magic,” she said a couple minutes later.
I liked that she saw the connection. That she understood.
“War and magic. The world is full of both. So are we.”
I lifted my head as a thin call echoed across the field, then eased Cassie off me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. Freya’s coming home.”
Cassie put on her T-shirt without her bra, then pulled on her underwear and jeans. She was standing next to me when I spotted Freya swooping across the field, her dark wings outstretched as she soared through the sky.
“There she is!” Cassie said. “I see her!”
I laughed. “You sound surprised.”
“I wasn’t sure.” She studied the bird with an awe I understood. “Wow… she’s so beautiful.”
I called out with three-short whistles, the cue I’d used to train Freya, and she swooped lower as she approached Cassie and me.
A familiar surge of exhilaration traveled up my spine as she got closer. I heard the flap of her wings, felt the wind holding her aloft.
Felt like anything and everything was possible in the moment before she landed on my glove, ducking her head like she had secrets to share.
I smiled down at Cassie. “See?”
“You’re the reason she came back,” Cassie said.
I looked down at her, my heart full to the brim, and wondered if Cassie knew that all those days in the hospital — those days when I’d been surrounded by darkness, a machine pushing air in and out of my lungs — she’d been mine.
