“I don’t know, okay?” Julia confessed, some of the fight leaving. She quieted her voice, and her shoulders loosened a bit. “We didn’t burn her stuff on purpose. There was a fire in the house. A lot of stuff was lost, but I remember seeing a few pictures of Mom. I can’t recall where they’re at right now.”
Julia was fidgeting with her fingers, and her throat was moving, she kept swallowing. She was lying. Dani saw it. She knew her sister’s tells and she was reading them right now.
Dani wanted to call bullshit on her sister, but she refrained. It was their first meeting in ten years. There’d been no hugs, no handshakes, and no tears of happiness. There hadn’t even been a ‘welcome home.’ Julia hadn’t said she missed her, and Dani didn’t think she missed her sister back either. There was so much they needed to say to each other, or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they could go through life not talking at all. No. Dani considered it. It was tempting, but she knew at some point they’d have to talk.
Jake. Erica.
But Dani wanted to focus on one thing right then. She wanted a picture of her mom. And whether Julia was going to give it to her or not, she was going to get it.
One way or another.
She was sitting on a bench toward the north end of the fair’s pond. It’d been man-made so it wasn’t large, and it couldn’t be classified as a lake, but it wasn’t the typical mud-like pond that Dani always thought when she heard that word. No. This body of water was serene, and calm, and there were lights set up all around it. A path circled it with a few benches set up so people could sit and enjoy the view.
Because she was sitting at the north end, she saw Jonah coming long before she would’ve heard the quiet crunch of his shoes on the path. Not that she would’ve heard much. He was silent, and almost ghost-like. He sat beside her, leaning back to mirror how she was sitting.
She kept her gaze trained on the water. It always soothed her. Any water. She needed that soothing at that moment too. She slid her hands inside her pockets. “I’m good. I just needed a breather.”
“You know what I do, right?”
She nodded. “You take care of Falls River for us.”
“I’m in charge of the town’s water front. I oversee everything. So if someone wants to build on the river, I’m the one who gives permission to their permits or not. There’s a lot of other stuff I do, but the one area that I get a kick out of is when I check on the park. There’s always this whole line of little kids there. They’re all lined up. One by one, shoulder to shoulder, just throwing rocks into the water. You think they’d get tired of it, but they never do.”
He bent down, scooped up a rock, and tossed it in the pond.
“They feel powerful when they do that.” Dani watched the waves ripple. “My ex-fiancé was a psychologist with the Red Cross. He told me that one time. He tried to explain to me why the kids in the orphanage always wanted to go to the ocean.”
She was talking, and she had no idea why. She’d barely acknowledged Boone, and now she was talking about the orphanage? Maybe she should’ve been shocked at her confession, but she couldn’t put the brakes on what she was saying. She frowned. Maybe she was getting tired of holding everything in?
Jonah glanced at her. She saw it from the corner of her eye. She still didn’t turn to him, even when he asked, so quietly, “You were engaged?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
Dani shook her head. A sad laugh slipped out. “I thought you’d talk about the orphanage, not the guy.” She looked now, a grin teasing at her mouth. “We’ll go with him. I’d rather have that conversation than the other one.”
Jonah grinned back. “Now I don’t know what to ask.” He laughed softly. “So you were engaged, huh?”
Her head fell back and she laughed with him. It was the first genuine laugh she’d had, and then she sobered because she couldn’t remember the last time she laughed for real. She sighed. “That felt good. I haven’t done that in a while.”
She waited for the line. She looked good laughing. She should do it more often. It was always that same message: be happy. Don’t be sad. Or at the very least, don’t show you’re sad. Be fake. When Jonah didn’t say either, and she waited a beat to see if he would then and he didn’t, she murmured, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not telling me to laugh more. For not telling me to be fake.”
He shrugged. “Trust me. I get it. And I like reality, not fake shit.”
“My family’s the opposite. They want fake every day.” She gestured back where the beer gardens were located. “Julia’s not changed. She’s lying to me, too. I asked for a picture of Mom, and she said she couldn’t ‘recall’ where she saw they were. That’s bullshit. She knows exactly where they are. She just doesn’t want me to have any.”
“Why a picture of your mom?”
“Because I don’t have any.”
Because she’d been stranded in a place for so long and she didn’t know if she was going to live or die. Because she kept thinking about her mom, kept feeling her presence, and she just wanted to see her face one more time. Dani felt her throat closing up, and some tears threatening to spill. She didn’t want to cry. She couldn’t remember the last time she did that either.
“I get that.” Jonah nodded. “There were a few things I wanted of my mom’s when she died. They were small things, but they were damned important to me. One was a picture of her and me, the other was a picture of her and Aiden. It was nice to have a picture of my mom in my wallet. Comforting. It helped, especially when I was around my dad’s family. They’re like sharks. Always circling for blood in the water.”