Page 45 of Thunder

"I told her we'd figure it out. And then she was gone, and I spent two years thinkin' she took off because I didn't do enough, didn't call enough, didn't drive down and drag her to a doctor myself. Two years of that. Turns out she didn't leave at all. Turns out I couldn't have saved her from what actually happened no matter what I did."

The two of them go quiet.

And I sit ten feet away with my hands around a coffee gone cold.

I understand that I’m eavesdropping on the exact grief I helped cause, and there's a shovel in my history that put that woman in the ground.

Her son is sitting right there wrecked over her, and I’m not sure he knows I'm one of the reasons.

The sisters go not long after—Grace to get off her feet, Dakota trailing her, the two of them folded together the way grief folds people.

It strikes me even through my own guilt that at least the two of them have found their way back to each other in all this.

It's the third sister who's alone in it.

Shiver doesn't leave with them.

He comes to the bar instead, and he drops onto the stool two down from where I've finally gotten myself upright, and he signals the prospect behind the bar for two, and the kid pours two whiskeys and sets them down.

I look at our prospects, Ford and Buckley. "Go wash the bikes out front. Both of you. Take your time."

They know an order when they hear one.

They're gone in ten seconds, and then it's just me and Shiver and two glasses of whiskey in an empty clubhouse.

We drink the first one without talking.

That's the way with men like us.

You don't rush it.

He pours the second himself from the bottle the prospect left.

"How's my baby sister doing, Thunder?" He says it easy. Casual. Eyes on his glass, not on me.

But there's nothing casual about Shiver, never has been, and the question lands exactly where he aimed it, which is straight through the center of me.

I could play it.

I could say which one, or fine, I guess, or any of the dodges a man keeps in his pocket for exactly this.

But this is Shiver, and I've got too much respect for him to insult him with it, and something about the whiskey and the photographs and the grave and the grief I just watched makes me tired of dodging.

I let out a breath that's half a laugh. "Nothing could ever get by you."

"No." He turns his glass slowly on the bar. "Nothing ever could. Ask my mother." A moment of silence, dark and self-aware, and then he lets it go. "You didn't answer me."

So I don't dodge. "She's strugglin'," I tell him, honestly, my eyes on the bottles behind the bar. "All of it's hittin' her hard. Harder than she lets on, and she doesn't let on much. Your sister's freezin' her out over a thing she didn't do, findin' out what she found out the same day everybody else did, and carryin' all of it by herself out there because she won't ask a soul for help."

I turn the glass.

"She's the strongest person I know, and she's about half a step from breakin', and there's not a damn thing I can do about most of it."

Shiver's quiet for a long moment.

"Most of it," he repeats.

"Most of it."