Page 82 of Reckoning

She reached for his hand. “That’s two. What else?”

“The meeting in Tennessee. It just confirmed everything I knew about myself, and what I’m supposed to do, and Mom found out while we were there that her Granny Barton’s house, which has been empty since she passed some years back, was deeded to her. They said her granny wanted her to know there was a place waiting for her if she ever came home.”

“Oh, Tate, how wonderful for them,” Briar said.

“Yes, it is, because they need to get the hell out of Star Ridge now, or reporters and journalists are going to plague them to the ends of the earth because of me.”

Briar took a deep, shaky breath. “I love you with every beat of my heart, and you know where I’ll be by next January. I don’t think you have accepted it yet, but you’re already gone. We knew this day was coming, and it did. Sooner than we thought, but for a reason.”

Tate swiped his hands across his face, as if wiping away a bad dream.

“I dreaded telling you. I wanted more time, but I can’t have it and keep you or my parents out of the circus that is going to be my life. We will stay in contact by phone. Always. But hopefully the media will assume you and I are going our separate ways now. I will find a place in New Orleans. I will be there before you. That’s all. You may not always see me, but I will know where you are, and I will keep you safe.”

She crawled into his lap, wrapped her arms around his neck, and buried her face against the curve of his neck. “And maybe…when the world’s not watching…we can find a way to be together. If only for an hour. If only for a kiss.”

“Like now,” he said, but when he brushed his lips across her cheek, he tasted tears. He groaned, tunneled his fingers through her hair, and centered his mouth on her lips. One long, desperate kiss later, they suddenly pulled away from each other, knowing if they didn’t stop now, there would be no stopping later.

Tate shuddered, knowing the ache in his heart was something he was going to have to live with.

“I love you, Briar…so much, but I have to go to the park now. Call me tonight. I won’t sleep until I hear your voice.”

Words were impossible, so she nodded instead, and moments later he was gone.

Briar got up to wash her face, but the tears were still rolling. Sad and determined not to break, she glared at herself in the mirror. “Suck it up, Briar. You don’t cry. You don’t freakin’ cry. You fixed the house. You fixed the garden. But you can’t fix this, and nobody died. He will not lose you and you know it.”

Chapter 15

The reporters and journalists, and two random strangers who’d driven a long way to find the boy from Star Ridge, were all gathered at the gazebo. Some were glaring at each other, unhappy with the way this was going down. Others were waiting in silence, planning what they were going to ask.

And then somebody saw a car pull up at a nearby curb and a big, dark-haired man emerge from the driver’s seat. It took them a few seconds to realize that that man was the nineteen-year-old kid they’d come to interview, and that the stride in his step looked like he meant business. They stayed silent, uncertain as to how this was going to work, as he ascended the steps and then turned to face them.

“Turn on your cameras and your recording equipment,” he said, so they did. Tate waited a few moments, then continued. “Don’t talk over each other. Don’t argue with me. If you don’t approve or believe in ‘the knowing,’ then that’s your problem. I will answer any question about myself, but if you start prodding into my family or personal life, then I will reciprocate in kind. If I wanted, I could know your secrets without asking, but I have my own boundaries and rules. So, if you don’t want your secrets told, then you don’t share mine. Are we straight here?”

It was the suggestion that, if he chose, he could reveal their personal lives as carelessly as they had planned to do to him. They nodded their heads in agreement and waited.

“Okay, then we’re good. Are you ready?”

They nodded again.

“My name is Tate Lee Bandy. I will turn twenty years old this coming January. This ‘knowing,’ as my people call it, is inherited from a long line of men on my father’s side of the family. There is only one born with the gift per generation. I am the sixth. I don’t know how this works. It’s how I came into the world, but we consider it a blessing and honor it.

“It is my intention to use it when help is needed. I will open an office somewhere in New Orleans in the coming months. I have nothing to do with private investigations. I’m not staking out cheating men and women. I know my path is to help people find what they have lost, whether it be an object or a person. No, I don’t see ghosts. No, I don’t conjure up spirits. I have a kind of precognition, and I can connect with something or someone by touching them, or by holding an object that belongs to the person they are asking about. I see flashes of what’s going to happen before it does. Sometimes those precious, split-second moments are enough to change fate before it happens. Sometimes it’s just seeing it soon enough to seek safety. I assume all of you have questions, so raise your hand. I’m your man.”

The questions began.

“What, exactly, did you see when you first saw Trevor Stennett? How did you know the driver wasn’t his father?”

“I saw flashes of scenes of what had happened. Think of yourself watching TV, holding the remote, and changing channels rapidly. Sometimes it’s slower, like a scene in a movie. But it’s never an analogy of what’s going to happen. It’s either something that already has, or certainly will.”

“How did you know the boy’s name?”

“I heard it in his head. He knew who he was, but he didn’t know any of us. Not the EMTs pulling them out of the wreck, or the police, or me.”

The next person down the line asked about the tornado when he was a child, and then recently saving his girlfriend and getting hurt.

Tate told them about the school, but he drew a line at talking about Briar. “We were both interviewed while I was still in the hospital. There’s nothing more to say. Watch the clip that aired.”

And so it went, answers without elaboration, right down to the last reporter.