Page 87 of The Truth You Told

Shay had packed them a lunch, which they took to the beach, the haystack formations looming large in front of them.

There were tourists everywhere, which was fine because they were tourists, too. Shay always hated people who complained about the very thing they were contributing to. They found a section in the back corner of the beach and laid out the blanket and cracked open the canned wine Shay had packed, each taking one. It was barely lunchtime, but vacations were for booze and sea mist in your hair—Shay would never be convinced otherwise.

Shay stared out into the water and wondered why all her best days revolved around the ocean. Was it the endless expanse, the opportunities it offered? Was it the salt-scrubbed feeling she left with, her skin raw but clean? Was it just the quiet, even with people buzzing about everywhere, that soothed the battered part of her that always worried about everything?

Maybe it was a combination.

“Tell me about something you love,” Shay said, shifting to get a better view of the sprawled Callum. He was uncharacteristically disheveled, and she loved it. He wore his polish as armor, a way to keep people from finding any imperfections. But now he was relaxed in jeans and a polo. For anyone else, that was barely dressing down, but for Callum, it was progress.

His eyes were closed, his lips tipping up. “I love you.”

“Stop.” Shay shoved at his shoulder and he barely moved. He was lean but incredibly strong, something she’d always found hot. “You know what I mean.”

“I love to keep score at baseball games,” Callum said. “It’s kind of looked at as an old-guy thing. But my mom used to take me, and she taught me how to do it. Three weeks before she died, we saw a no-hitter together. I have our cards framed in storage.”

Shay breathed in, breathed out. It was strange the things you learned about someone after years of being together. “That must have been a pretty clean card.”

He huffed out a breath. “Yeah.”

“We should hang them,” Shay said, nudging his thigh with her knee. “The scorecards.”

Callum chewed on his upper lip, the way he did when he didn’t want to smile too big and give away all his messy emotions. “I’d like that.”

“Why did she start liking baseball?” Shay asked. She didn’t want to stumble into stereotypes, but she would have been less surprised had he said his father was the one to take him.

“Her father played in the minor leagues,” Callum said. “He was awful to her. He hated his life, wanted to be better than he was. He took it out on my mother and my grandmother. And for some reason, my mother walked away from that loving baseball.”

“You’re the psychologist, you must have theories about why that was,” Shay said.

“I think if I was telling anyone else, I’d say it was because the game is predictable in a way,” Callum said, staring up at the sky. “And there’s ways you can track it, control it, and make it make sense. You can’t do that with abuse.”

“But it’s me . . . ,” Shay prompted.

“And so I’ll say, I think she loved baseball because her father loved baseball,” Callum said. “Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Family’s complicated.”

Shay flopped onto the blanket and thought about her own circumstances. She hated Hillary, and yet, when Hillary asked, she gave her a place to stay and then looked the other way when she dipped into Shay’s wallet.

You could love something and hate it at the same time.

“She changed what it meant,” Shay said. “For you.”

“The fingerprints are still there, though,” Callum said. “The bruises. I like that part of it, too. That she found her own way into giving it to me.”

“You never watch baseball,” Shay said, and only when the words left her mouth did she realize there was probably a reason for that.

“I went to a game the day after she died,” Callum said. “I have the scorecard. But that’s the last one I’ll go to.”

Shay felt like she should have known about all this before now. But she wasn’t into sports, never thought to ask about them.

“You know you’re doing okay, right?” Shay asked.

“What?” came from her left.

She pushed up onto her hand so she could study his face. “You think you’re failing on the Alphabet Man case, which makes you think you’re failing at life. But that’s not true.”

“I think his victims might disagree,” he said, almost meanly. Almost. But he had never been cruel to her once, not even when they fought.

“What do you think his answer would be?” Shay asked, because she knew it would throw him off.

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