“I know how desperate you are to catch that man. And I know you’ve lost yourself in the chase. You need to move on. Your mother would want that.”

“No offense, Reg, but that’s bullshit.”

My fists clench, and I’m shaking, because he can’t speak for my mom.

He sighs, and there’s that look again, the one he gave me on the first night. All his friendly-old-man vibes disappear, replaced by a look I recognize after all. He looks like my dad. He has the same sorrow stains. Only he’s better at hiding them.

“I don’t claim to know what you’ve gone through,” Reg says, “but I do know loss. And I know that nothing good can come from drowning in it.”

If I close my eyes slightly, if I concentrate hard enough, I can imagine my dad looking like Reg when he’s old.

I watch a tear forming in the corner of his eye, but he blinks, and it’s gone, then he touches my hand, his skin hard and rough.

“My wife passed away a year after we were married,” he says. “I waited a lifetime to meet her, and she was taken from me in no time at all. She was sixty-three when she walked down the aisle, and she was still the most beautiful woman in the room.”

Another tear forms, and this time, it slips out, falling into the cracks on his face before he wipes it away.

“She was ill the day I met her. But she didn’t tell me. She wanted a love affair, and I gave it to her. And then I watched her die.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but Reg shakes his head.

“We had a little while.”

He sits in silence, staring over my shoulder at something only he can see.

When he comes back, he blinks away whatever memory he was recalling and says, “I meant no offense. But you are focusing on the wrong thing. Go home and forget about the Magpie Man. Focus on your mother. Remember the memories you were lucky enough to share.”

I think about Reg’s dead wife, Bernie’s divorced parents, and all the other lives broken this way or that. I assumed that when you’re dealt a hand as bad as mine, nothing else compares. But maybe Reg is right.

I need to start living.

Chapter 72

The bus drops us back at school, and we all walk off in different directions. Some to the parents waiting with smiles on their faces, others to the back seats of cars already revving their engines, a few, like Emily, to the houses within walking distance, and me to the bus stop where I wait twenty minutes, then head home.

But first I knock on Jamie’s door, and when he answers, I try to ignore his smile and say, “I have to ask you something.”

“Okay.”