“He’s dead.” Alex stepped away from Harper and hugged Gemma. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him tightly to her, and she could feel his tears on her shoulder.

20. Coping

TWENTY

Coping

Harper leaned on the kitchen sink and stared out the window at Alex’s house next door. He’d been shaken up since they’d found the dead bodies the day before, and Gemma had spent nearly all her time over at his house.

Both Brian and Harper thought it was better for Gemma to be with him than upstairs in her room grounded. Alex needed her.

“How are you holding up?” Brian asked. He sat at the kitchen table behind Harper, drinking a cup of coffee.

“Fine,” Harper lied.

Nightmares had woken her up three times before she gave up on sleep entirely. To busy herself, she’d done all the laundry and rearranged the pantry by the time Brian got up at eight A.M.

“Are you sure?” Brian asked.

“Yeah.” She turned back to her dad and forced a smile to reassure him. “I didn’t know Luke all that well.”

“It doesn’t matter. Seeing something like that can get to you.”

“I’ll be fine.” She pulled out a chair across from him and sat down.

Brian had the paper spread out in front of him, the same way he did every Saturday morning. The bodies found in the woods had made the front page, so he had deliberately separated that page from the paper and thrown it away before Harper could see it.

Reaching across the table, Harper grabbed the crossword puzzle. Brian always started filling out the puzzles but gave up after getting only one or two words. He rolled the pen across the table, and she thanked him for it.

“So we’re just going to pretend that nothing happened?” Brian asked, and sipped his coffee.

“I’m not pretending anything.” Harper pulled her knee to her chest so she could lean on it as she filled out the crossword. “Something horrible happened. I just don’t have a lot to say about it.”

“Did I ever tell you about how Terry Connelly died?” Brian asked.

“I don’t know.” She paused, thinking. “I remember when that happened, but I was only five or six at the time. It was some kind of accident at the dock, right?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “A pallet weighing several hundred pounds fell off a forklift and landed on him. It knocked him down and landed on his stomach. I was right next to him when it happened, and he was still alive, so I sat with him until the ambulance came.”

“I didn’t know that.” Harper rested her chin on her knee and watched him talk.