Public Secrets

right now. It’s over now.” Gently he brushed at her hair. He had to fight to keep his rage buried. Her face was a mass of blood. One eye was already swollen shut. The other was glassy with shock. “Give me the gun now, baby. You don’t need it anymore. You’re okay.” He shifted so that she could see his face. Taking a scrap of what had been her blouse, he dabbed at the blood. “It’s Michael. Can you hear me, Emma? It’s Michael. It’s going to be okay.”
Her breath began to hitch violently. Shudders wracked her. He gathered her close, rocking while her body shook. Her hand was limp when he slipped the gun from it. She didn’t cry. Michael knew the sound she made as he held her couldn’t be called grieving. She moaned, low animal moans that died into whimpering.
“Ambulance is on its way.” After a cursory check of Drew’s body, McCarthy crouched beside Michael. “Messed her up pretty good, didn’t he?”
Michael continued to rock her, but he turned his head and studied Drew Latimer for a long time. “Too bad you can only die once.”
“Yeah.” McCarthy shook his head as he rose. “The sonofabitch is still holding the belt.”

B RIAN WATCHED THE clouds race across the sky as he sat beside Darren’s grave. Each time he came to sit in the high, sweet grass, he hoped he would find peace. He never had. But he always came back.
He’d let the wildflowers grow where his son was buried. He preferred them to the small marble marker that carried only a name and two dates. The years were pitifully close.
His parents were buried nearby. Though he had known them for decades, he remembered his son with more clarity.
From the cemetery he could see plowed fields, spaces of rich brown cutting through the rich green. And the spotted cows grazing. It was early in the day. Mornings in Ireland were the best for sitting, dreaming. The light was soft and pearly, as he’d never seen it anywhere but Ireland. Dew was glittering on the grass. The only sounds he could hear were the bark of a dog and the distant hum of a tractor.
When Bev saw him, she stopped. She hadn’t known he would be there. Through the years she’d been careful to come only when she knew Brian was elsewhere. She hadn’t wanted to see him there, beside the grave where they had both stood so many years before.
She nearly turned away. But there was something in the way he sat, his hands resting lightly on his knees, his eyes looking out over the green hills. He looked too much alone.
They were both too much alone.
She walked quietly. He never heard her, but when her shadow fell over him, he turned his head. She said nothing, but laid the spray of lilacs she carried beneath the marble marker. On a sigh, she knelt.
In silence they listened to the wind in the high grass, and the distant purr of the tractor.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked her.
“No.” Gently, she brushed a hand over the soft grass that covered their son. “He was beautiful, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.” He felt the tears well up and fought them back. It had been a long time since he’d wept here. “He looked so much like you.

“He had the best of each of us.” Her voice quiet, she sat back on her heels. Like Brian, she looked toward the hills. They had changed so little in all these years. Life continued. That was the hardest lesson she had learned. “He was so bright, so full of life. He had your smile, Bri. Yours and Emma’s.”
“He was always happy. Whenever I think of him I remember that.”
“My biggest fear was that I would forget somehow, that his face, and his memory, would fade with time. But it hasn’t. I remember how he laughed, how it would just roll out of him. I’ve never heard a prettier sound. I loved him too much, Bri.”
“You can’t love too much.”
“Yes, you can.” She fell silent for a time. A cow began to low. Oddly, the sound made her smile. “Do you think it’s just lost? That everything he was and might have been just vanished, just went away when he died?”
“No.” He looked at her then. “No, I don’t.”
His answer made all the difference. “I did at first. Perhaps that’s why I lost myself for so long. It hurt so much to think that all that beauty and joy had been here for such a short time. But then I knew that wasn’t true. He’s still alive in my heart. And in yours.”
He looked away, toward the distant, shadowed hills. “There are times I want to forget. Times I do whatever I can to forget. It’s the worst