But he cut her off. “I was here when they brought that dog in. It was dead.”
“It wasn’t,” Nora said. “Obviously it wasn’t.”
“And then she puts her hands on it, and poof, he’s alive and wagging his tail. And in three days he’s running around the yard, bringing me sticks to throw.
“But when it really counts? When it’s cancer? Forget it! Who would want a gift like that, anyway? That’s why I don’t want to be like her! You can’t change anything that matters.”
And then he spun on his heel and followed the cat, and Nora and Brendan stood in frozen silence as he thumped up the stairs.
“How did he know Charlie has cancer?” Brendan asked.
“He doesn’t,” Nora said too quickly, her troubled eyes on the empty doorway her nephew had gone through. “His mom—my sister—died of cancer. I’m sorry, I don’t think there’s anything more I can do for Charlie. You should take him home to Deedee. She can spend his last days with him.”
Brendan could feel weariness like a dull ache in his bones.
Not just because it was late, either.
It was the weariness of it all.
A boy who had lost everything and who already knew you could not change anything that really mattered. A woman who was trying desperately to help him through it, even though she had lost, too.
Brendan realized he had actually been thinking that cat was getting better. Had been bringing Deedee pictures, instead of preparing her to face yet another loss.
This was the truth he had been doing his best to outrun for two and a half years. It was just as Luke had said. When it really counted?
A man was powerless.
And there was no feeling in the world quite as bad as that one.
Luke came back down the stairs. He looked as if he had been crying, and Brendan almost envied him those tears, the release they brought from the inner storm.
The boy’s face was white and strained with the manful effort of trying not to let everything he was feeling show. He had Charlie tucked under his arm, an unwilling football.
“I’m going to fix him! And I’m going to pay you back your money, too!” Luke stomped back up the stairs.
Nora bit her lip, sent Brendan an imploring look.
He shrugged. He wanted to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, but the past few days had challenged that. The aunt had something. He had felt it when she’d touched his arm.
And Luke had something, too. That cat was acting better, even if he wasn’t actually getting better.
Though that something that Nora and Luke had—that gift with things wounded—was not necessarily what they needed.
Despite the shrug, he knew his indifference was pretended. Caring had crept up on him.
Brendan recognized their lives were a web he could get tangled in.
Was already tangled in, whether he wanted to be or not. And he didn’t want it. He’d spent a long time locked in his lonely place, avoiding entanglement.
He walked out the door, refusing to look back at Nora. Free of the enchantment of her house, walking through the warmth of the early summer evening to his car, Brendan Grant vowed to himself he wasn’t coming back here. Not until it was time to pick up Charlie.
Dead or alive.
Nora loved the barn. It had taken a dozen volunteers and a hundred man-hours to make the falling-down old structure into an animal shelter, but now it was perfect. She was in the small-animal section, two rows of roomy cages facing a sparkling clean center aisle.
After a night like last night, she needed the peace she felt working alone here. She had a rock-and-roll station blasting, music from the fifties. It was partly to keep her moving through the exhaustion after twenty-four hours of being woken every hour on the hour. It was partly a nice distraction from her whirling thoughts.
But the animals loved music. Humming along, she reached inside the rabbit cage, picked up a droopyeared bunny she had named Valentine, and tucked him into her bosom.
He wriggled against her, snuggling deeper.
“You want to dance, sweetheart?”
“Sure.”
She whirled. Brendan was standing there, watching her. The rabbit must have taken the sudden hard beating of her heart as a warning of imminent danger, because he scrambled out of her arms, over her shoulder and down her back. He hit the floor running.
Brendan reached behind him and closed the door to prevent bunny escape, then turned back to her.
How unfair that he looked even better in the pure afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows high up the walls than he had looked last night.
He must have come from work. He had on a white shirt and gray pants. A tie was loosely knotted at his throat. He looked handsome and sure of himself, a model for GQ, only more real.
And she still had a lump the size of a baseball on her forehead, and was wearing a charming blue smock of the one-size-fits-all variety that swam around her.
“I—I haven’t seen you for a few days,” she stammered. She hoped there was nothing in her voice that revealed how she had waited. And watched.
And hated herself for both.
“Busy at work,” he said.
“What are you doing here now?”
“Deedee insisted. Luke’s been sending her pictures, but she had to come see for herself.”
Nora had no idea Luke had been sending on pictures of the cat. She probably would have asked him to stop, if she knew. What did they all think was going to happen?
“Yesterday he sent a video of that old cat playing with a ball.”
She looked closely at Brendan. “Please tell me you don’t believe that animal is going to get better?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe, Nora. The thing is, I’m getting better. And I never believed that would happen.”
“What do you mean, better?” she whispered.
He rolled his shoulders. “I’ve been in total darkness. I can feel the light trying to get through. There are cracks in the wall and light is seeping in, and every time I patch one crack, another one appears.”
It felt as if she couldn’t breathe. As if she was going to cry. It felt as if she could run to him and put her arms around him and whisper him home.
To her.
“But the walls have become who I am, so when they crumble,
