Page 86 of Forever Dark
A little smile touched her mouth despite herself.“You wouldn’t have stood a chance back then.Dad was made from granite.”
Connor leaned back in the seat.“Well, it kind of worked out in the long run.We’re pretty close now.”
That surprised her enough to show.He’d told her he’d been visiting her dad, but “pretty close”?She had a hard time seeing it.
“Yeah, that just seems weird to me,” she told him.“How the helldidthat happen?”
He looked out through the windshield as he answered.“Your dad had a fall a couple years back.Diane called the sheriff’s station because an ambulance was going to take too long.I went over and helped him up.”
Selena turned slightly toward him.“Diane called you?”
“She called the station.I was the one closest.”
“And that was it?”
“No.”Connor’s fingers tapped once against the steering wheel.“I ended up staying a few hours.He’d bruised his hip, pride worse than anything else.Diane was running around trying to get ice and blankets and call the doctor.Your dad told her to stop fussing at him or he’d hurt the other hip.Same old Robert Raven charm.”
A breath that might have been a laugh left Selena.
Connor went on.“Later, once he felt better, he asked if I wanted a drink.”
“I always thought you and my dad were more likely to throw your drinks at each other than actually drink them.”
“Things change, Selena.It was a bottle of Scotch.The good stuff, too.Maybe he figured near-death experiences called for quality.Maybe he just wanted to say sorry in his own way for all the aggravation he’d given me over the years.”
“And you just… talked?”
“We did.”
“About what?”
Connor’s mouth shifted.“Weather.Crops.Why he thought modern country music was an insult to God.Eventually old grievances.”
Selena looked back out at the bus.
That was harder to picture than the fall itself.Her father and Connor in the same room after all those years, not circling each other, not separated by the wreckage she had left behind.
“When we got married,” she said quietly, “I’d never have predicted that.”
“Your dad’s mellowed,” Connor said.“And I’ve probably hardened a bit.Started seeing things a little more in line with him.I guess age does that.Somewhere we met in the middle.”
A pause followed.
“Besides,” he added, “we had one thing in common we could bond over.”
Selena knew before she asked that she would not like the answer.
“What was that?”
Connor kept his eyes ahead.“We were both estranged from you.”
For a moment she only stared at him.
Anger came up late but hard, rolling through her chest with enough force that she set the coffee in the cup holder before she spilled it.
“You know it wasn’t all my fault.”
Connor gave one of those maddening small shrugs, barely more than a lift of the shoulder.
