Page 107 of Shatter

For a second, I think she's going to say it back.

She doesn't.

Her mouth works, and nothing comes out.

Then she makes a sound in her throat and throws herself at me.

She wraps her arms around my neck and presses her face into my shoulder and holds on so tight it hurts, her body shaking against mine.

She holds on like she's afraid I'll disappear if she lets go.

Like everybody else she's ever loved.

I wrap my arms around her and hold on back.

She didn't say it.

A dull ache sits low under my ribs anyway, and I let it.

I pull her down onto the bed with me, both of us still dressed, and hold her while she shakes.

I don't let go until long after the rain starts.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Anni

Pierce always sits with his back to the window.

It's the third Tuesday he's come to the clubhouse, and every time, he takes the same chair at the long table in the common room, the one facing the bar, with the afternoon light behind him.

He used to do it at family dinners, too.

Took the seat across from Dad with the window at his back, so Dad had to squint to look at him.

I used to think it was an accident.

Gunnar sits on a barstool ten feet away with a can of Coke he hasn't opened, pretending to watch a baseball game on the TV over the bar.

He isn't watching the game.

He hasn't taken his eyes off Pierce's hands since he walked in.

"I brought you something." Pierce reaches into the pocket of his quarter-zip.

Gunnar's head turns.

Pierce freezes, then smiles at him, slow, and pulls out a photograph.

Only a photograph.

He slides it across the table to me with two fingers.

It's old, the colors faded to orange and brown, the corners soft and rounded from handling.

A blue house with white trim and a sagging porch, strings of glass fishing floats hanging from the eaves like green and amber Christmas lights.

A little girl sits on the top step in a yellow raincoat, grinning, with a gap where a front tooth should be.