He shakes his head. ‘You got poisoned and shot a day and a half ago.’
‘I’ve been getting poisoned for a year now – and, ironically, that’s why I’m still alive. And I didn’t get shot; I got grazed. On the shoulder. I promise I won’t walk on my shoulder.’ I get him to smile, at least, but he’s still worried. ‘Please, Bo.’
He nods gravely. ‘OK.’ Then he gives me a half-smile. ‘I went into town to look for you, you know. But I had no idea where your grandparents lived, and at the shelter they said no one named Lena had ever worked there.’
I give him a matching half-smile. ‘Well, Rain, I always preferred Lena to Magda.’
He grins at me sheepishly, and we share one of those rare moments when you not only understand someone else, but you see yourself in them. We stay like that for a while.
I take his hand. ‘What did you do with his body?’ I ask. He knows I mean Rob.
‘My dad and I buried him deep,’ Bo replies, his voice low and rough.
‘And his cell phone?’ I ask carefully. I don’t know if Bo knows enough about electronics to have considered it. ‘What did you do with it?’
‘I took it back to his father’s camp and left it there. Don’t worry, I wore gloves.’ Bo’s face is pale and frozen.
‘So you saw.’
He nods. ‘We had no idea, you know. We knew the Claybolts were drug dealers, and my mother hated them, but we didn’t know.’ He stops. He swallows. ‘I thought about taking Rob’s body back to his father’s camp, too, but . . .’ He looks away and lets out a long breath.
‘But if his body is ever found, I could go to jail for killing him,’ I answer for him.
‘It was self-defence – more than that. You were defending all of us,’ he says, his anger mounting.
I smile and pull his hand against my chest, holding him to my heart. ‘You don’t have to tell me I did the right thing. But thank you.’
He gathers me to him in a careful hug, avoiding my shoulder. ‘I know you did the right thing,’ he says.
We stay like that until I can cry.
Bo gets me down by having me sit in a hammock that’s attached to a rope, which is swung over a branch right outside the tree house and counterbalanced by a big rock. He holds the hammock as I get in and then lets me swing down slowly. It’s fun, actually, and it answers the question as to how I got up there in the first place.
‘She’s awake!’ M
oth screams, and then her tiny body is hurling towards mine.
Bo intercepts the pre-school projectile. He tosses her up in the air playfully and reminds Moth that she needs to be gentle with me. Moth settles for a one-armed hug and an Eskimo kiss.
Sol gives me a tortured look. I smile, but I skip over her because the conversation we need to have can’t happen now.
Karl and Aspen are simultaneously too fascinated and too terrified by me to come any closer than ten feet, so I just wave at them to let them know that I see them.
Raven stops in front of me. She’s trying to say thank you, but I’m not going to make her.
‘Good thinking to hide that training bow,’ I tell her. ‘You saved my life.’ Before she can argue about who saved whom, I move on to Ray.
‘You’re a great doctor,’ I tell him. He looks at his feet and gets angry at them because he’s not good at hearing compliments.
‘Your blood salts were so high and kidney failure was definitely a worry, and I didn’t have everything . . .’
His eyes are blinking rapidly. I interrupt him before he can go into genius mode and get all technical on me. ‘Ray. My kidneys are applauding right now.’
He laughs, and shuffles, and tries to disappear, so I let him.
And then, Maeve. She folds me into a deep, soft-bodied, sweet-smelling, everything-is-going-to-be-OK mommy hug. I just let myself sink into that for a while. Strange how quickly the unknown can become second nature. The strangers in the crowd are now my family.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks, all business now. Because of course she knows I didn’t drag myself out of Bo’s bed before I was totally healed for nothing.