Page 151 of The Forbidden Center

Chapter twenty-eight

Colt

That night Tova is in her room and the house has gone quiet. I’ve been upstairs twice, downstairs three times, and I’ve moved my phone from the counter to the table and back again for no reason I can defend.

The piano is the problem. I keep coming through to look at it the way you look at a dog somebody else owns.

The fourth time through I stop walking and sit down on the floor beside it with my back against the bench, because there’s nowhere in this house I want to be upright.

Astrid comes in with a glass of water and stops when she sees where I am.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Her face changes.

I laugh once. “Yeah. That was bad.”

She stays in the doorway while I look at the far wall.

“Do you want me to ask?”

“No.”

The glass is still in her hand and she hasn’t drunk any of it, and I know that woman well enough by now to know she came in here to set something down and forgot what.

“Sit with me if you want.” It comes out level, which surprises me. “I’ve got some things I have to say. You don’t have to do anything.”

Then I shut my mouth, which is the hardest physical act I’ve performed in a calendar year.

It takes her a while. Long enough that I notice the hall light behind her and her sleeves pushed up like a woman who has been doing something.

Then she puts the glass on the top of the piano and sits down on the floor beside me.

Not across from me. Beside. Her back against the bench, her shoulder against my left one, her knees up, and her hands around them.

“All right,” she says.

So I start, and where I start isn’t where I meant to.

“My father had three hundred acres outside Bandera, and in that house nobody talked to you unless you finished something.”

Her hand lifts off her knee an inch, the way it does right before it goes to work on me, and settles back.

“I’m not telling you so you’ll do something,” I tell her. “I’m telling you so you know me a little.”

“Then keep talking, Colt.”

There it is. Two days of weather in one sentence.

“My mother left when I was four. No brothers. No sisters.” I’ve said that out loud to maybe two people, and one of them was a team doctor with a clipboard.

“Before I was serious about hockey, and before college, I rode broncos. Texas and Montana, summers, from about fifteen.”

“Broncos.”

“Broncos.”