The Color of Courage (26 page)

Chapter 23

We didn’t go to the family picnic. Summer’s funeral was held the same day. My interlude with Adam felt more and more like stolen time as we dealt with the aftermath of the attacks and struggled to define a new existence for HQ and each of us within it.

I stood between Adam and Evan while the minister droned on about her heroism and her release from her earth-bound host. To my right, Adam put his arm around Kirby as she sobbed. On my left, Evan comforted his mother, who’d lost two of the people she loved most without getting a chance to tell them. Frank stood by himself on their other side, and despite the problems he and Summer had had, his loss was strong enough to incapacitate him.

I couldn’t move for the weight of grief around me. My own raw pain made it impossible to put up shields. Dark emotions pressed in on me from either side. Even Trace’s grounding hands on my shoulders, his solid support behind me, weren’t enough. Charles had freed me from my old emotional shackles, but he’d also created new ones that even my relationship with Adam couldn’t release.

After the coffin was lowered into the ground and her mother and brother dropped fistfuls of dirt onto the gleaming wood, the small group allowed near the grave started to disburse. The crowd of general public, who had flooded the cemetery but were held back several hundred feet, was eerily silent as everyone walked away.

I couldn’t follow. As the others moved off, I stood at the side of the grave, unable to believe she was in there. I couldn’t see her broken, empty of the spirit that had given her life. Instead, I saw her laughter as she sparred in the gym. Her grim determination in taking out the jewel thieves who’d dared to kidnap a child. Her belief in her brother despite their issues, and her love for all of us. It couldn’t be gone.

Summer had been my reason for joining HQ. She’d been the person who made me feel special for not being normal. I couldn’t see my future without her place in it.

Alone, hating it and nevertheless feeling like it was the way I should be, I stood without knowing how much time had passed. When footsteps swished on the grass to my left, I didn’t look, even when I smelled Evan and sensed him at my side. Guilt joined the pain. He’d lost more than I had, so much more. I could drive an hour out of the city and be surrounded by my family, including a mother who’d never abandoned me even though she felt I had abandoned her, and a brother who understood what it was to be like me. He’d lost Summer, and it was my fault, and he’d blame me for it.

I had Adam, too, and Evan didn’t know that. I’d insisted on meeting him when his department finished his debriefing. I’d taken him to my apartment and told him about Summer, how it had happened, and held him when he broke down. He let me, and never laid the blame on me, as if he sensed my self-recrimination was more than enough.

Now, he urged me to turn and enfolded me in his arms. I buried my head against his chest and suppressed my tears. He felt me shudder and whispered in my ear, urging me to let go, that it was okay to feel my own loss. We stood and cried together, and I wished we hadn’t started because I didn’t think we were ever going to stop.

At one point, I opened my eyes and saw Adam watching us. He was blank, both expressionless and unreadable. But I knew he understood.

Evan took a deep breath and wiped his face with his sleeve. “Thank you, Daley.”

“Don’t—”

“Shut up.” His voice was rough but not harsh. “Don’t tell me not to thank you. It wasn’t your fault she died. It’s the nature of this business. Both our businesses.” He let out another long breath. “Thank you for helping me get her back. And for showing me there is happiness out there for me. Even if it’s not here.” He touched my chest, so lightly I barely felt it, and his lips curved a little.

“Evan . . .”

“I know you’re for Adam,” he said, and the sadness in his voice, even if I couldn’t see it, cracked my heart. “He deserves you, and now that he’s proving it by fighting for you, I’m not going to.”

My tears, which hadn’t completely stopped, flowed faster. “I’m so, so sorry, Evan.”

He shook his head. “Just tell me one thing, okay?”

“Okay.” I sniffed and blinked and tried to stop crying.

“Could you have loved me? If things were different?”

Though I would have lied, I didn’t have to. “I was already halfway there.”

He pulled me into his arms again, burying his face in my hair and holding me even more tightly than he had before. “Be happy,” he whispered, and released me to walk away. I watched him go. He stopped and said something to Adam, who nodded and looked grave as he shook Evan’s hand and clapped him sympathetically on the shoulder. A minute later, Evan had disappeared into the crowd.

Adam was next to me then, his hand wrapping around mine and watching me watch Evan going away. Then we stood by the graveside, staring down at the white lilies on top of Summer’s coffin.

“We should go to the picnic,” he said. “She’d want us to.”

“I’m not so sure. She’d probably gripe about us forgetting about her that easily. She’d say we should go to a martini bar and toast her all night, crying and laughing at every story we can remember to tell.”

I heard him smile. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Is that what you want to do?”

I tore my eyes away from the hole in the ground and sought Trace and Kirby, who stood a few feet away, both with red eyes and wet faces.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I want to do.”

We walked across the grass, and as we caught up to Trace and Kirby and started walking together, our steps in unison, I was less aware of the gap of Summer’s absence than I was of the bond between the four of us. Charles had said those bonds were fragile, easily broken, but he was wrong. They were unbreakable. He’d made sure of that.

And I’d make sure they stayed that way.