The bay doors were rolled up when I got there, a little after six, and the long gold light of early evening was pouring into the garage, catching on the chrome of a half-assembled engine and the dust floating in the air.
Kade was sitting on the open tailgate of his black truck with Lug Nut stretched out beside him and two bottles of root beer sweating on the metal between them. He'd showered. His hair was still damp. He had on jeans and a gray T-shirt that said WILTON'S GARAGE across the back in faded letters, and when he saw me coming across the gravel, he stood up.
"You came," he said.
"I said I would."
"Yeah. But you also ran away from me twice." The corner of his mouth tilted. "I wasn't sure which Eva I was gonna get."
Lug Nut lifted his head, considered me, thumped his tail twice against the tailgate, and went back to sleep.
"He likes you," Kade said.
"He doesn't know me," I said.
"He's a good judge of character. He bit the guy from the parts store." He held out one of the root beers. "Sit?"
I sat. The tailgate was warm from the sun. He sat down beside me, Lug Nut between us like a furry chaperone, and we looked out at the gravel lot and the long, flat road and, beyond everything, the mountains, turning pink and gold at their peaks as the sun went down behind us.
I'd rehearsed this. All day. Every version of it. In the diner, in the walk-in cooler, in the bathroom, in the long walk across town. I'd practiced it in my head until the words wore smooth.
Every one of them went out of my head.
"I don't know how to start," I said.
"Start anywhere," Kade said. "I'm not going anywhere."
* * *
I started with the sky.
I told him what I'd told Sari. All of it. The Hall of Mending. The Writ. The Veil. Six hundred years of healing only the names I'd been given. The Threshold, and the fall, and the fire. I told it better the second time, or maybe just faster, because I knew where the hard parts were and I didn't let myself stop at them.
He didn't interrupt. He listened the way he worked on an engine: very still, very focused, his eyes on my face, taking in each piece and setting it carefully in place.
When I got to Gary Pell, his jaw tightened. When I got to Ray Tolliver and the woman with the geraniums, he looked down at the gravel and his hand closed around the root beer bottle so hard his knuckles went white.
When I got to him, the street, the blood, the warmth, he looked up again.
And when I was finished, he didn't say anything for a long time.
The sun slid lower. The mountains went from gold to rose to a soft, deep purple. A meadowlark sang somewhere out in the field across the road, sweet and liquid. Lug Nut snored.
"Okay," Kade said finally.
That was all. Okay.
"Okay?" I repeated.
"I'm thinking." He turned the root beer bottle in his hands. "Give me a second. I'm rebuilding my whole understanding of the universe on a tailgate. It's a lot of parts."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out wet. "Do you believe me?"
"I watched your ears glow," he said. "Tyler told me my pelvis was crushed. I have a bruise on my chest shaped like two hands." He lifted the hem of his T-shirt a few inches, and there it was, faded to a pale yellow now against his skin, but unmistakable. Two palms. Ten fingers. Right over his heart. "Yeah, Eva. I believe you."
He let the shirt fall.
"Can I—" He stopped. Looked a little embarrassed. "Can I see it? The thing you do? Not on anything big. I just want to see it with my eyes open."
He held out his right hand. There was a fresh cut across the back of his knuckles, the kind you get when a wrench slips. Shallow, a little raw.
A copy from NovelPhoenix.com is being read away from its source without permission, while the author's chapter there supports them.
I took his hand in both of mine.
It was different, touching him when he wasn't dying. His hand was warm and rough, calloused across the palm, and much bigger than mine. I could feel his pulse in his wrist, strong and steady. I could feel the small sting of the cut. And I could feel something else, too, something that wasn't pain at all, that went from his skin to mine and straight up my arms into my chest and made it hard to breathe.
Feel where it wants to be whole.
The glow spread between our fingers, soft and gold in the dusk. I heard him take a breath. The cut faded. Pink. Then gone.
I didn't let go right away.
Neither did he.
* * *
"My dad," Kade said, after a while. He was still holding my hand. Neither of us had mentioned it. "Could you have—if you'd been here—"
I knew the question before he finished it. I'd been dreading it since the cemetery.
"Maybe," I said honestly. "I don't know. If it was his heart, and I'd been close enough, maybe. But his name wouldn't have been on any Writ, Kade. Not if he died. And if I'd saved him anyway—" I swallowed. "I don't know what it would have cost. That's the whole problem. I never know."
He nodded slowly. He looked out at the dark shape of the mountains.
"He used to talk about engines like they were people," Kade said. "He'd say, a car's not a bunch of parts. It's a system. Everything's connected to everything. You change the timing belt, now the valves open different. You put in a stronger fuel pump, now the injectors are under more pressure. You fix the thing that's broken, but you change the load on everything else, and sometimes the next weakest part fails." He shook his head. "People'd come in mad. 'You fixed my alternator and now my battery's dead.' Like he broke it. And he'd say, 'No ma'am. I fixed your alternator. Your battery was always gonna go. You just couldn't hear it till the bigger noise stopped.'"
I stared at him.
"That's what happened," I said slowly. "With Gary. With Ray. I fixed the loud thing. And something else broke."
"Yeah." He turned to look at me. "But here's the other thing he used to say. You can't refuse to fix the alternator because you're scared of the battery. Somebody's gotta fix it. You just have to know the whole engine's going to change. And you have to be willing to stick around and deal with what comes next."
"In heaven, someone else saw the whole engine. I just did what I was told," I said.
"And you hated it," Kade said.
"I hated it." The words came out raw. "I hated it so much I jumped off the edge of the sky."
"So now you're down here, fixing alternators with your bare hands, and you can't see the whole engine, and it scares the hell out of you," Kade said.
"Yes," I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"Gary looked at his radio," he said. "Ray hurt somebody. Those were choices, Eva. Theirs. You gave them more time. You didn't drive the truck. You didn't do what Ray did. You're not the reason people do bad things. You're just the reason they were still around to choose." He squeezed my hand. "That's a heavy thing. I'm not saying it isn't. But it's not the same as being guilty."
I didn't know I was crying until he reached up with his free hand and brushed a tear off my cheek with his thumb.
Aurelle had done the same thing, on the fire escape. She'd stared at the tear on her fingertip like it was something strange and frightening.
Kade didn't. He just wiped it away, gently, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Like crying was just a thing people did, and he'd sit there with me for as long as it took. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
* * *
"Can I ask you something?" he said, when I'd stopped.
"Yes," I said.
"You'd stopped. After Ray. You promised your friend. You told me you'd sworn you'd never do it again." He looked at me steadily. "So why me?"
I'd known this was coming. It was the one part I hadn't told Sari.
"The man," I said. "In the hospital room. The one I watched die, the night I jumped." I made myself meet his eyes. "He had your eyes. Gray, with green in them. And your mouth. The way it goes up at the corner when you're about to say something funny."
Kade went very still.
"When you walked into the diner that first day, I thought I was seeing a ghost. That's why I dropped the pot." I took a breath. "And then, in the street, you looked up at me, and you said coffee girl, and your mouth did that thing. And you'd been hurt helping a stranger whose car wouldn't start. And I thought, I can't do it again. I can't stand there and watch it happen again. Not this time. Not to someone like you."
The meadowlark had stopped singing. The first stars were coming out, pale and faint over the mountains.
"Was it him?" Kade asked quietly. "Am I—was I—"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't think so. Souls don't come back. That's what I was always taught. And you were here, alive, the whole time he was dying. It doesn't make any sense." I looked down at our hands, still joined on the warm tailgate. "But I don't know everything. I know that now. I don't know half as much as I thought I did."
He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn't going to answer.
"I don't think it matters," he said finally.
"What?" I asked.
"Whether I'm him. Or whether I just look like him. Or whether it's all some cosmic accident." He turned my hand over in his and looked at it, at my palm, the faint lines on it, like he was reading something there. "You didn't save me because I was him. You saved me because you couldn't stand to watch somebody die again when you could help. That's who you are. That's the whole thing." He looked up. "Seems like the right reason to me."
My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.
"Your friends," he said. "The angels. Will they come back? For you?"
"Aurelle will. She said so. She'll keep coming until I'm ready." I swallowed. "And if I heal again, they'll hear it. It rings, she said. Like a bell. I healed you, so they've already heard."
"Are you going to go?" Kade asked.
"I don't know," I said.
He nodded. He didn't argue. He didn't ask me to stay. He just sat there on the tailgate in the dark, holding my hand, while the stars came out over the mountains one by one.
"Well," he said, after a while, "until you do know. Have dinner with me tomorrow."
I turned to look at him.
"A real dinner," he said. "Not a patty melt at your own counter. Somewhere with candles. Tyler said I should buy you a really, really nice dinner, and I'm pretty sure he's right."
The corner of his mouth tilted up.
"Unless angels don't date," Kade said.
"I don't know," I said. "I've never tried."
"Then let's find out," Kade said.