Page 87 of Creeping Beautiful

Try to see how this is all gonna work out.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - INDIE

Things changed between Adam and I after the incident. He was never the most talkative of the guys. Always preferring his own company, even when we were all together in the same room. Adam is just one of those contemplative thinkers.

But not in the same way as McKay.

McKay is thoughtful and introspective.

Adam is creepily quiet and calculating.

Yeah. That’s how they’re different. When McKay is thinking he’s wondering about things such as why that man stopped his horse in the woods on a snowy evening.

That’s a poem by Robert Frost. I didn’t know that until I went to boarding school and we had to study that poem. And I had never actually caught McKay reading that poem—though there was a book of poems by Robert Frost in the Old Home library. But the minute we started discussing it in literature class I knew that if McKay had ever read this poem, he would’ve pondered all these same questions.

I, for the record, do not think that man was contemplating suicide in the snowy woods on his way home. I think he was just taking a moment to admire the beauty of where he was that night.

My teacher said I was wrong. That the imagery and word choices were set up in such a way that everything pointed to an ending, i.e. death.

But I just didn’t care. I wasn’t gonna agree. And Robert Frost denied it anyway. Maybe he was lying? Maybe he just wanted people to keep thinking about his pretty words and not feed them easy answers? That’s possible. But in my mind, it’s as simple as this:

You do not kill yourself.

What is the point of that? Someone else is always coming round the bend trying to do that for you. You don’t make it easy for them.

And I knew McKay would agree.

Here’s what I think about that poem—once it’s written it doesn’t really matter why that man wrote it. It only matters how I interpret it. And I choose to see things my way.

Anyway, Adam wasn’t contemplating poems when he was thinking.

He was plotting.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Because it was Adam’s plots and plans that made us such a successful team. Especially after the Company fell and we had no more support. So I’m just saying he was different than McKay in this regard and that’s why he was the boss.

But after the candlestick incident he started making me uneasy.

Sometimes he would look at me funny. Not like I was amusing. When I was smaller, I could see those thoughts in his mind at times. He liked me. I know he liked me. I could just tell by the way he took care of me on the jobs. He didn’t say, “I love you, Indie.” Ever. But I knew he loved me.

After he came home from the hospital, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

I would catch him staring out the dining room window. And while there are a lot of very pretty things to look at through each and every one of Old Home’s windows—the lake, the gardens, the pavilion, the woods, and from some of them you could see the river—that’s not what he was looking at through the dining room window.

He was looking at Nathan’s house.

I knew he blamed Nate for what happened to him that day. Even though I was the one who struck him in the head with the candlestick and sent him into surgery and then months of physical therapy and recovery, he did not blame me.

That much I knew.

He blamed Nate. And from that day on he hated him.

But Adam never went over there again. He kept his distance from Nate and me. Even after things calmed down and McKay lifted my grounding and let Nate come over to visit. McKay said I was not allowed to go over to Nate’s house anymore, but that Nate could come here. And that was fine with me. We weren’t trying to be sneaky. We just wanted to be together.

Anyway. Adam was quiet after he came home from the hospital. He was a little wobbly with his walk and even though no one mentioned it, he slurred his words a little for a few weeks. But that passed and pretty soon his hair grew out and mostly covered the large scar down the side of his head. And we all moved on.

Moving on meant jobs. And we had lots of jobs at this point.

Adam was very busy planning and plotting and organizing the leftovers. That’s what we called them. All the other assassin teams that were left adrift after the Company fell.