“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.”