Page 22 of The Truth You Told

What had prompted Max to ask that? In her mind, Shay turned over every inch of her car, every inch of the night she’d made that junkyard trip. There was nothing incriminating for Max to have stumbled over.

Max could be eerily perceptive sometimes, too perceptive for her age. There was a cold calculation to it as well, that always set Shay on edge.

There was an old joke Shay had heard one time about how to tell if someone was a sociopath. You gave them a scenario: They had met someone they were romantically interested in at their mother’s funeral, but didn’t get the person’s number. How did they find the person again?

For a sociopath, the answer was obvious. They killed their father.

Shay wasn’t sure what Max would say, and she had no interest in testing it.

A lot of the time, Max could be incredibly caring, especially when it came to Beau and Shay. But she could flip the switch when she had to.

If Max weren’t capable of that, Shay wouldn’t be sitting in Dr. Tori Greene’s office right now.

Shay tried not to shiver beneath the cool blast of the air conditioner at the thought.

Beau was sitting at the firepit at the side of their house when Shay and Max got back from Galveston.

Max offered a halfhearted wave that didn’t match the sheer joy she’d been letting seep out all day. Maybe her well was empty. That was fair. Shay’s own rarely got past half-full.

When Shay sat in the second cheap plastic lawn chair, Beau held out a Miller Lite, the top already off. She took a long swallow, savoring the slight bite of beer after a day at the beach, which was one of her favorite sensations in the world.

“How come I didn’t get an invite?” Beau asked, but he was just joking. He’d worked an overnight shift at the hospital and had likely only woken up in the late afternoon. “How was Dr. Greene’s?”

Shay lifted a shoulder. Max was never particularly chatty after the sessions.

“Same old.”

“Do you think she’s helping?” Beau asked after a minute of staring into the nonexistent fire. It was too hot to do anything more than prop their feet on the stone pit.

“More than the others.” Max had hated the previous therapists she’d seen and had spent more energy screwing with them than making progress. Although Shay wasn’t sure what progress looked like for a kid like Max.

Were they all just trying to keep a boulder from tumbling down a hill? Had her fate been determined the moment she’d pulled the trigger?

Shay slid a look at Beau. He was wearing his curly hair styled these days—short on the sides and long and floppy on the top. Shay had started calling himboy banderfor a few days, but when he didn’t answer with a similar rejoinder or witty remark, she realized he cared. So she’d shut up about it.

He was relaxed now, in a way he usually wasn’t—limbs loose, a small smile on his lips. They both worried too much. Beau had also been carrying around an extra dose of anxiety ever since his father had fallen off the wagon in spectacular fashion and slammed his car into a tree. The accident hadn’t killed him, unfortunately. Instead, he’d ended up in long-term hospital care that insurance mostly but didn’t quite cover. She was pretty sure the stress of it weighed on Beau every day.

So, no, Beau didn’t need to know what she’d done with the gun, and he certainly didn’t need to know about Callum Kilkenny. He’d probably have an aneurysm if he found out she had an FBI agent’s number in her phone.

Or that an FBI agent had hers.

She took another swallow, and put it out of her thoughts. Callum Kilkenny had a lot more on his mind than the trashy bartender he was slumming it with.

“Thinking about visiting your dad on my next day off,” she said.

“He’d like that,” Beau said, but what he really meant was that Beau would like it. His dad was pretty much comatose most of the time,and high on morphine the rest. She doubted he could pick her out of a lineup if he was paid to.

Still, he was family in a strange, convoluted way. Or, more importantly, Beau was.

Hillary had imparted little in the ways of wisdom in the few years she’d stuck around to raise them, but she’d always made them appreciate the importance of that. Even though Shay could now see the irony of that particular lesson, it had also stuck for whatever reason. Maybe because Beau had. Even when the two of them had been saddled with a preteen with more attitude than vocabulary.

He’d stuck.

That was a truism she could always count on.

So she did her best to pay him back in little ways when she could. She sometimes bought him his favorite six-pack unexpectedly or shooed him away to the movies on her one night off. Or went and sat in a hospital room for an hour with no one for company but a man who drooled all over himself. Even though that same man had routinely taken all his aggression out on a ten-year-old’s little body. Had broken Beau’s bones, and bruised his skin, and then told him he loved him afterward, creating some kind of screwed-up feedback loop in Beau’s mind about relationships and violence.

Shay would still do it, and smile the whole time.

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