After which they’d all murmur that he or she looked so peaceful, Conall thought cynically.
More horror showed on the two young faces.
Lia stood, went around the table and gave each of them a hug. “Your mom would want you to remember her alive. Smiling at you, playing with you. She can keep living in your memories.”
They thought about that as she returned to her chair. She’d obviously plopped down on her butt between rows in the garden. She must have no idea how enticingly the circle of dirt emphasized one of Conall’s favorite parts of her body.
Having thought about their mother alive—or not—the boys turned as one to Conall. “Have you ever seen anyone who’s dead?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. Lia’s eyes had widened in alarm. He was momentarily distracted by the way they seemed to deepen in color. Sunlight, oddly enough, brought out the brown, making the color rich and warm and earthy. Indoors like this, the green predominated, making him think of the mysterious, green light in old-growth forests.
God.
He dragged his focus back to the subject. He wasn’t enthusiastic about remembering the faces of men he’d shot. They had not looked peaceful when he was done with them. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I have.”
“Did you go to any of their funerals?”
“Once.” He’d been under deep that time, for over a year, with a Central American crime cartel. He hadn’t lost himself, exactly, but by the end he’d been grimly holding on to memories of what life for a normal American was like. He’d needed desperately to think of a man mowing the lawn, the scent of newly cut grass sharp in the air; people texting on their fancy phones as they stood in line at a Starbucks to order a Cinnamon Dolce Frappuccino, kids throwing wadded up paper balls at each other on the school bus. People who weren’t ruthlessly killing to achieve their ends and satisfy their egos. He’d been caught somewhere he shouldn’t have been and had had to knife a man, and, yeah, four days later he attended the solemn church service for that vile excuse for humanity. He hadn’t wasted time contemplating the dearly departed’s soul. Instead, Conall had sat there wondering how much humanity he still clung to.
There was no part of that he wanted to share with two boys who were still grieving a mother who had actually loved them.
“He was Catholic,” he told them. “The priest droned on and on. The service was in Spanish,” he added. Yeah, that was the way to go; throw a bunch of irrelevant details at them and maybe they could talk about what the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant was, or why a priest talked so long, or—
“Did he die because he was sick, like Mom?” asked Walker.
Conall’s eyes met Lia’s again.
No, he died because I stuck a big honking knife blade into his body right beneath his rib cage and then I thrust upward until blood gushed and his eyes went sightless and his knees sagged.
“It was…an accident.” He thought he’d done well in keeping his voice free of any inflection whatsoever, but she heard or saw too much.
“That’s enough talk about death and dying,” she said, sounding sharp. “Why aren’t you kicking a soccer ball instead?”
“Because I haven’t finished my morning cup of coffee?” he said mildly.
“Well, why don’t you?” Lia suggested.
“We’re almost hungry for lunch. Is it time for lunch?” Brendan asked.
“Nope. Why don’t you each have an apple or a banana? Or there are some baby carrots already peeled in the crisper.”
Walker turned big eyes on her. “Can we have a cookie if we have an apple first?”
“We have dessert after some meals. Not after snacks.” Lia stood. “I’m going back to my weeding.”
Her coffee, Conall saw, was almost untouched. That wasn’t really why she’d come in. She’d been checking on the boys.
Maybe she wanted to see me. It was a wisp of hope that felt embarrassingly juvenile. He felt thirteen years old again, like poor Sorrel, slumped at his desk in Language Arts as Mrs. Barnes talked about organizing information into a coherent piece of writing. He was wondering for a fleeting, agonizingly sweet second whether Kayla Czernek had flipped her hair to get his attention, before he saw her peek beneath her eyelashes at Guy Hedman and he knew that, of course, she didn’t even know Conall MacLachlan existed.