She can’t reach it from here. She gets out of the car, opens the back door, kneels on the backseat to retrieve it . . . and finds Mick’s down jacket.
Caught off guard, she grabs it and presses it to her face. She breathes in the faint scent of some kind of body spray he must have used the last time he wore it, probably trying to impress a girl: Brianna?
Even so . . .
I know my son. I might not know what he’s doing every moment of every day, but I know who he is.
Determined to find him—-to help him—-she gets back behind the wheel, starts the engine, and grimly drives toward home.
In the split second before Casey slashed Rowan’s throat, a single word escaped it.
Why?
Now, standing over her, watching her bleed all over her scuffed hardwood floor, he answers it.
“Because you destroyed us! That’s why!”
She doesn’t reply, of course. She’s too busy bleeding, moaning. Soon she’ll be unconscious. But on the off chance she can still hear him, he explains.
“Before you came along, we were a family. My mom and Rick were so happy, and we were normal, and . . . and then you ruined everything. You and your stupid . . .” He kicks her in the head, the hair, with his work boot.
She groans a little.
She’s still alive. Good. She should hear this.
“Nothing was ever the same after that. You moved, we moved, but it was like you infected us with some kind of virus. And my mom . . . she knew you were trying to take him away from us. She knew.”
Years later—-on that lonely Thanksgiving weekend when it was just the two of them—-Mom tried to convince Casey that Rowan hadn’t caused the divorce. She acted as though she barely remembered Rowan.
But he knew better.
You couldn’t forget a woman like that.
He never had. And he was certain, when Rick left his mother a few years ago, that Rick never had, either.
On Monday night when Casey asked him about her, he admitted he’d seen Rowan again recently, but claimed it was innocent, and insisted that Mom’s death wasn’t her fault.
“How can you say that? She killed herself on the same day that you . . . that you and Rowan . . .”
“It had nothing to do with that. She was overwhelmed at work. The days were getting shorter and darker, winter was coming. Your mom always hated that time of year. And she’d just gone through a miserable holiday and a miserable weekend.”
“So she killed herself?”
“Come on. She struggled with depression all her life. And that date wasn’t just meaningful to me and Rowan. It was meaningful to me and your mother. We met on November thirtieth.”
That gave him pause. He’d never realized that.
“So it was your anniversary?”
“Not of our wedding, of the day we—-”
“I know, I heard you. But then why would you choose that day to . . . to . . .”
Rick sighed heavily. “Every year on November thirtieth, we . . . celebrated. At midnight.” He was slurring his words a bit by then. The medication was beginning to take hold. “We stayed up late, and we had champagne, and we . . . toasted. You get it.”
Yeah. He got it. He’d seen it.
“That year, your mother got home late from work, and she was in a pissy mood, and she fell asleep early. I tried to wake her up, you know, at midnight, but she got angry and I got angry and . . . you know. We went to bed angry and we woke up angry and then I . . .” He shrugged droop-ily. “I did something stupid. Casey, come on. It was fourteen years ago and—-”
“Don’t call me Casey!”
“All right, so what do you want me to call you . . . Kurt? Are you going by Kurt again now?”
He shrugged. Might as well. One name had been given to him by the father who’d abandoned him, the other by the stepfather who’d promised he would stay and then ultimately did the exact same thing. And why?
Because of her.
“It was your fault!”
He kicks Rowan again. She makes a whimpering sound, like a wounded animal.