Page 17 of Love Bound

"We're talking millions here. I'm not doing it. When you get your mind back you're going to regret this. You'll be a nonparticipating partner in the meantime."

"No, I'm not."

"As of yesterday, you are," he says.

Damn. He just doesn’t get it. My oldest friend and he doesn’t get it.

"You'll get quarterly deposits. What you do with the money is up to you," he says.

"I won't work there. I won’t be at meetings. I won’t be running cases, won’t be functioning." The moment I say the last one, I know it’s a mistake.

"Well, that's clear."

I sit up, my T-shirt clinging to my back and my ass completely drenched. "I want to do this. I want to be here. It was her favorite place, and she always talked about it. I want to develop a park next door for families who have lost their children. I need to be here for a while." I stop. "I'm not thinking about it, you know. I told you, I'm past that."

How I got past wanting to end my life, an idea that devoured me, reverberated, claimed me like an unhinged obsession for the first six months after she died, I still don’t know. Something just shifted inside me. The harm it would cause others—my mom, my younger sister, my friends, Nic.

"There's something else you should know," he says as I duck back under to screw in the new valve.

"Yeah?"

"Steven Miller is being released next month."

The blood drains from my arms and they feel suddenly heavy. I crack my forehead on the way out from under the sink when I sit up too fast and say, "Are you shitting me? He's served nothing—no time."

"He's getting out on good behavior," Nic says.

"He's a fucking sociopath."

"Court psychologist thinks otherwise."

I feel a hard lump form in the back of my throat and it gets coated in bile.

Nic's hand comes down on my shoulder. "Listen, I know we couldn’t prove it, but he's out now and he'll have me breathing down his neck."

"It doesn’t matter," I say.

"It doesn’t matter? He's insane. He's going to go after somebody else. I'm convinced Allision wasn't his first."

"He's robbed me of my life. It's what he said he was going to do and he did it."

"Allison wouldn’t want you to be doing this. It's been two years," Nic says.

"I know how long it's been."

***

Nic ended up staying for hours. He actually got dirty, wet, and had a beer, clad in my clothes and my old pair of sneakers. His purple Hobart tie and his Zegna suit hung pristinely dark blue on a plastic hanger in his equally pristinely blue car. He always pointed out how the Zegnas were a gift from a client. I’d point out that he didn’t have to wear them.

"Someone's got to show off," he'd answer.

We cart crap out of the cellar all day. Two old washing machines, a brine barrel, boxes and boxes of broken dishes, one moldy box of stuffed animals, Legos, puzzles and word games that have all transmuted to digital. Then there was a countless stream of fans, rusted out window air conditioners, tools, gears, empty gas cans, broken lounge chairs, three broken canoes, and just shit.

I finally told him to get lost and to head back, that I wasn't putting him up at my inn. Not yet anyway. I left after that, the truck loaded with trash, and headed off to the dump. One local guy, about a thousand years, old told me to turn left at the church, wind around for four miles inland, and watch for the seagulls—couldn’t miss it.

I didn’t have the patience to explain to him that he had no idea what I could miss.

Two years ago, I came home from a job, walked through the back door to the deck, and found my wife at the bottom of the pool—a hose wrapped around her neck, her arms, her swollen abdomen.