Chapter Twenty-Seven

Trace tracked Bridget’s progress back to the airfield via the laptop in his office, though Lenna responded to all communications from her console behind the ticket desk. He remained in his office, hiding, until the Mounties deplaned and the chaos of five tired, happy climbers and their gear passed through the building and out to the van with Canadian plates parked in the lot. He was in no mood to deal with people. Not even Canadians. His life—the one he’d thought was finally coming together after months of grief, regret, and uncertainty—felt completely out of control.

The woman he loved had called him out for breaking her trust and left, and he was still at a loss as to how to fix things. The deal that represented freedom to him stood between them, and he didn’t know what to do about that, either. His dead brother had a baby on the way, which might have been miraculous under different circumstances. Correction. It was miraculous, regardless of the circumstances, but he could see a train wreck setting up between Lilah and Rose, and he could do nothing to avoid it since he was sworn to secrecy.

The only thing he could do, right now, was follow through on the commitment he’d made to Izzy and talk to Bridget. A conversation that promised to be a fun trip down memory lane. Hey, Bridge, wanna talk about why you left college with one year to go? Figuring there was no time like the present to rehash old disappointments, and more to the point, his week couldn’t get any more twisted up, he walked out to the main room in search of his sister.

He didn’t find her there, but when he asked Lenna, she jerked a thumb toward the parking lot. He watched from the door as Bridge helped the Canadians load their gear into the van. She gave one of the guys a shoulder-bump as a farewell, and the man pulled her into a dramatic clinch and planted an exaggerated kiss on her, while the rest of the group hooted and hollered. When the guy released her, one of the girls stepped up and did the same. His sister laughed and then proceeded to accept similar shows of appreciation from the rest of the group.

Jesus, Bridget. He scrubbed a hand over his face. Fun and games. Life was just fun and games to her. That’s why she’d left school. She and Shay shared the live-for-thrills philosophy. Why stick with something as staid and prudent as academics? Where was the fun in studying? Especially when good old Trace handled all the tedious bullshit. Well, that was going to end soon. Maybe with someone else in the picture, she’d step up. Or maybe not. Totally her choice.

“New friends?” he asked as she approached him. He couldn’t quite keep the tone out of his voice.

She raised her eyebrows but kept her relaxed, loose-limbed pace. “What’s up your butt?”

He held the door and followed her inside. “I need to talk to you.”

She shrugged, still not breaking stride to the coffee station “So, talk.”

“In private. My office.” Exerting a small power play of his own, he walked past her and down the hall to his door. He sat in his desk chair, accidentally kicking Izzy’s space heater in the process. He hadn’t shoved it into a closet yet, on the grounds that when she returned, she’d need it. Hope sprang eternal. Or he excelled at denial. He chose to think it was too soon to say.

Bridget came in holding a cup of coffee. “What?”

“Close the door. Take a seat.”

She let out a loud breath and shoved a hand through her hair. “Look, I just spent two days on a mountain. I’m tired. I’m dirty. I’m unreasonably excited at the prospect of using a toilet that flushes. Can you maybe just tell me what it is you want?”

Okay, it wasn’t all fun and games. Private charters involved work. Hucking up Big Kat with a group of noobs meant shouldering responsibility for their welfare. “This is important. We have to talk. If you need to take five first, go ahead. Then come back, shut the door, and have a seat.”

Well, great. Now worry overtook the annoyance in her expression. “I can wait.” She drew the door closed and dropped into one of the guest chairs. Leveling eyes brimming with apprehension on him, she asked, “What’s happened?”

“Nothing like what you’re thinking. Relax, Bridget. Everybody’s fine. This is important, but it’s not life or death.” At least, he didn’t think so. “Izzy told me I needed to talk to you. Specifically, I needed to ask you why you left college.”

She stared at him blankly for a long moment, then her lips twisted into a frown. “Why? What is this about?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but I think you do. I think there’s something I need to know about that skinny, hollow-eyed kid who came home from Stanford after her third year, moped around like a ghost for months, refused to go back, and then threw herself into living for the day and not giving a damn.”

“Oh. Okay, Izzy, Lilah, and I had a chat during girls’ night last week, and it sort of came out that maybe, according to something Shay told Lilah, you thought I came home because I had an eating disorder. I never had an eating disorder. You can stop trying to feed me all the goddamn time.”

“You had something,” he insisted, picturing her how she’d been those early months home. Listless. Solitary. Not the adventurous, energetic ass pain of a sister she’d been from birth ’til the time she’d left for school, and not the adventurous, energetic ass pain of a sister she was today. For that weird space of time, she’d been…different. Depressed. And then, thank God, she’d slowly shaken it off, along with all her ambition and most of her caution. “Whatever baggage you brought home from school that year weighed more than second thoughts about your major or anything along those lines.”

Bridget put the coffee aside and narrowed her eyes at him. “Why are you curious about this now?”

“I told you. Izzy said I should ask.”

“No. I mean, why didn’t you ask me back in the day?”

“Because Shay told me you had an eating disorder, and I should back off. I didn’t want to put any undue pressure on you. I wanted you to get better. And then go back to school.”

“Shay told you I had an eating disorder?” She sat back and crossed her arms. “That guy could juggle the truth when he wanted to.”

“Well. No.” Thinking back, he realized he’d commented about her appearance, and speculated, and Shay hadn’t corrected him. “He sort of left me to draw my own conclusions.”

She inclined her head. “Like I said, he could juggle the truth.”

“So, what made you leave, Bridge? Izzy thinks it’s important I know.”

Her eyes jerked away from his, and—holy crap—her cheeks reddened. “It’s not.”

“Come on. Tell me. What’s the harm, after all this time? Did you kill a man in Palo Alto just to watch him die?”

That drew a weak smile from her. “Not that I know of.” She met his gaze. “I fell in love. First week of first year. Right out of the gate, so to speak. Fell hard. Fell deep. I thought he fell too but eventually I realized I was wrong about that. He was a little older, a grad student earning his JD/MBA. Once he collected the diplomas, he blew me a kiss and got on with his life. I was heartbroken, as you tend to be when you’re twenty-one and suddenly realize the person you made the center of your universe doesn’t want the gig. I was stuck at a school I didn’t like, pursuing a degree I didn’t care about, surrounded at every turn by painful memories of happy, deluded me.” She shrugged. “So, I left.”

“Ah, Bridge.” With genuine sympathy for that heartbroken girl, he got up and walked around the desk to crouch by her chair. “I wish you would have told me, then.” Would he have understood? Not the way he did right now, with his own heart a bloody mess of his own making over Izzy.

“Why?” She patted his shoulder. “What would you have done? Kicked his ass for me?”

“Maybe. It’s the time-honored privilege of big brothers the world over. Before you fell hard, did he tell you to watch your step, or did he hold his arms open?”

“Wide open.” Her eyes went cold. “He pursued me. Won me over. Made me feel like I meant something—like we meant something. Hell, we were joined at the hip for three years, and then—” She snapped her fingers. “Over. Done. Gone.”

“Yeah, Bridge. I would have kicked his ass.”

She smiled. “Thanks. I don’t know what it says about me, but that makes me feel better. Tell you what, big brother, if I ever cross paths with Archer Ellison again in this life, I’ll let you do it.”

Archer Ellison. Archer Ellison? Why did that name ring a bell?

“Oh, fuck.” He shifted to the other guest chair, lowered himself into it, and pinched the bridge of his nose to push back the headache that threatened. This was the other half of the Shanahan shitstorm Izzy had gotten stuck in the middle of. Archer Ellison was Skyline. He was the buyer.

“What’s wrong?”

He took a wary look at Bridget. “You’re not going like this.”

“If it involves Archer, probably not, but tell me anyway.”

…

“Jeez, Trace. What now? I swear we’re having more conversations these days than when I was alive.”

Oh, God. Not again. Trace blinked into the thin darkness. Shay sat in a chair across the bedroom, silvery in the moonlight washing in from the window. “I didn’t call you. I never do. Not on purpose.”

“Dude. You’re sleeping in my bed, throwing all this anxiousness into the cosmos.”

Okay, maybe little brother had a point. After his conversation with Bridget, which only served to toss another wrench into his once well-honed plan, Trace had come home, ruminated over a stiff drink, and solved nothing. He remembered wandering into Shay’s old room, feeling utterly adrift.

“Sulking,” Shay corrected. “There’s no reason for it. You don’t want to sell your interest in the airfield any more than you want to sell a kidney. It’s a part of you. Always has been, always will be.”

Fresh anxiety sent his heartbeat racing. “I don’t want it. I can’t handle it.”

“That’s a load of crap.”

He didn’t want to argue this. Nobody could tell him how he felt. Not even Shay. “Are you sure you’re supposed to use language like that, now that you’re…”

“Dead? Why not now? Is a lightning bolt going to strike me down for swearing? A little late for that, dontcha think?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Anyway, when you dump crap in my lap, I don’t hesitate to call it as I see it. And the I-can’t-handle-the-responsibility-of-the-airfield crap is crap with a capital C.”

His heart wanted to beat out of his chest. His deepest, darkest guilt refused to be tamped down. His voice shook with it. “If I ran the place so fucking well, why are you dead?”

Shay sent him an impatient look. “Because I flew into a mountain. Pathetic, but true. You already know this.”

Trace rubbed his hands over his eyes, to push back tears. “You asked me to take the run for you. I refused, because I was pissed at you for showing up late and trying to get me to sub at the last second. If I’d just done as you asked, you’d be alive right now.”

“And you’d be dead?”

“Maybe.”

“Would that be better?”

“Easier.” He lowered his hands and stared at the ghost of his brother. “It’d be easier on me.”

“That’s also pathetic. In fact, your survivor’s guilt is even more pathetic than my accidentally flying into a mountain. Look, Trace, I told you last time, everything happened the way it was meant to happen. Everything’s continuing to happen the way it’s meant to happen. If you’re going to go to all the effort of manifesting me, you ought to at least listen to the things I say. You’re trying to pass judgment on a situation you don’t have the right perspective to see fully. My life and my death? Not your call, or your responsibility. All that stuff happens way above your pay grade. By the way, I didn’t ask you to take the run for me because I thought I was going to die. I asked because something came up that I wanted to do more than fly to Anchorage. You can sit there second-guessing yourself until you’re in the ground too, but it would be a waste of your life. Selling out of the airfield—banishing yourself from something you love—won’t level the scales. They’re already level. It would just be another waste.”

Even if the entire episode was the work of his own overwrought conscience, it eased something inside him to hear the words come from his brother.

“Besides.” He sat back in the chair and crossed his arms, smiling slightly. “You can’t sell.”

“I know.” It helped to admit it out loud. Instead of feeling trapped, he felt calm for the first time in months. “Bridget dodged a bullet.”

“Hmm,” was all his brother saw fit to reply.

That annoyed him, exactly the same way it would have annoyed him any other time Shay had information he refused to share. Enough so, Trace didn’t filter himself when turning the situation back on his brother. “You know what you did, right?” He figured he’d sworn not to share Lilah’s secret with another living soul, so Shay didn’t count.

His brother’s smile remained. “Yes. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, and if I had the chance, I’d do it differently, for Lilah’s sake, but again, everything happened the way it was meant to happen.”

“This baby is meant to grow up without its father?” Shay wouldn’t be able to mistake the accusing note in his voice. He’d heard it too often when alive.

“Lilah and our baby will have everyone they need, including a guardian angel.” Shay pointed his thumb at his chest. “And trust me, with Lilah’s good looks and my personality, that kid’s gonna need me full-time.”

Trace smiled in spite of himself. “No doubt.” He followed the mild insult with a huge yawn. “Love you, Shay.”

“I love you, too.” So saying, Shay stood, approached the bed, and reached out to touch Trace’s forehead. He felt nothing—no brush of fingers, no warmth of flesh—but sleep suddenly dragged at him, heavy and tiring, like swimming in deep water, fully clothed. “Trace, you’re the best big brother anyone could want. I always saw that. I should have said it more often. Go to sleep, now. Get some rest. Then wake up, live your life, and be happy.”

The pull of sleep intensified. “Izzy…”

“Go get her tomorrow.”

“How?” He tried to will his eyes open, because this was important, but they were so heavy.

Shay laughed. “Shit, man, have you never fucked up with a woman before?” Still chuckling, he went on, “No, probably not. Look who I’m talking to. Okay, bro, listen closely. You’ve gotta do what men who have fucked up throughout the ages have done. Apologize. Beg. Woo her with highly persuasive make-up sex.”

“In…that…order?”

“In that order.”