Blue sank onto the pew beside Sienna's daughter, aware of Eddie sitting beside her, his shoulder brushing hers. Music came up - an instrumental version of Amazing Grace - and she took a big, deep breath to try to ease the tremulous feeling in her chest and belly.
Eddie's hand landed on hers where it rested on her thigh, and she glanced at him and found herself looking straight into his eyes. There was so much familiarity and affection there. So much hard-won knowledge and understanding. It was so good to have him here with her, to know he was on her side.
Turning her hand, she threaded her fingers through his and held on tight.
Chapter Eighteen
Two hours later, Eddie watched from across the room as Blue stood listening to a short, nervous looking guy with thinning red hair. Her expression was neutral, but she nodded every now and then, and when the short guy started crying, Blue reached out and touched his arm briefly.
Short guy wasn't the first person to approach Blue at the wake, and Eddie was guessing he wouldn't be the last. It didn't surprise him one iota that Blue was popular amongst her former foster siblings. She was beloved by the staff at Ink, too, all of whom loved her for her salty tongue and no-bullshit, seize-the-day attitude. Eddie figured the same held true here.
The woman in front of him finished with the coffee urn and he helped himself to a cup before adding milk. He was considering the cookie selection when Sienna joined him at the refreshments buffet.
"Avoid the ones with the little black bits in them. Raisins as hard as rocks," she told him.
"Noted, thanks," Eddie said.
He glanced across at Blue, and Sienna followed his gaze.
"That's Andrew. He was one of the short termers."
"Alice obviously helped out a lot of people."
"Yep. She was pretty amazing." Sienna blinked rapidly a few times, then gave a sniff that was almost a laugh. "Sorry. You'd think I'd be all done with crying, I bawled so much at the chapel."
Eddie shrugged uncomfortably. "It's a funeral. I'm pretty sure tears are almost mandatory."
"Blue didn't cry," Sienna said.
Blue hadn't. She'd held his hand so tightly it had hurt, but she hadn't cried.
"I suppose she'd consider it a weakness, breaking down in front of all of us," Sienna said after a thoughtful beat. "She was always good at keeping up her boundaries like that. Tough as nails."
There was unalloyed admiration in the other woman's voice.
"She's pretty stubborn, that's for sure," he said, aware there was admiration in his tone, too.
"It's more than stubbornness," Sienna said. "She's got this unassailable core, you know? When we were at Alice's together, half the time I'd be a sniveling wreck because of something one of the other kids said or something that had happened at school, but Blue was like Teflon. You could throw stuff at her, but it just never stuck."
"She knows who she is," Eddie said. It was one of the first things he'd noticed about her, all those years ago. She didn't have a problem standing up for herself, and when she liked something, she let it be known. Ditto when she didn't like something.
"Yeah. That's it. Not like the rest of us." Sienna laughed self-consciously. "Look at me - I've spent half my life trying to find myself in a hypodermic needle. Becky keeps hooking up with guys who want to hurt her. Don't even get me started on Jonah … Blue's the only one of us who came out unscathed. She's amazing."
Eddie frowned. Unlike Sienna, he didn't think Blue had come out of her difficult childhood untouched. There was a reason her apartment looked like a furnished rental, after all.
Across the room, Blue and Andrew had been joined by a tall guy in army fatigues, his neck and arms inked with the kind of amateur tatts prison inmates typically inflicted on one other. He had the unblinking, challenging stare of someone who'd done time, too, and he towered over Blue's five feet nothing as they started talking.
"That's Jonah, right?" he checked with Sienna.
"Yep. That's Jonah." Sienna leaned across and snagged herself another cookie. "I used to have the biggest crush on him. But Alice wouldn't let any of us go out with each other. Not a bad rule, in retrospect."
Eddie could only imagine the kind of crap that might have gone down if Alice hadn't had that very wise rule. Especially in a house full of messed up, hormone-crazed teenagers.
"Jonah told me this story about Blue once," Sienna said suddenly. "I always think about it when I'm up against it. He heard it through some other kid in the system. Apparently there was this bitch in charge of a group home where Blue got shelved for a while, and she freaking hated the fact that she couldn't get to Blue, couldn't make her cry. You got people like that sometimes. Sick bastards who enjoyed the power. Anyway, Jonah told me that Blue apparently had this book that she used to keep all her photos and letters and other stuff from her parents in. Like a scrap book, I guess. And this bitch found it and made up some bullshit excuse to burn it in front of everyone."
"Jesus." Eddie set down his coffee, his appetite suddenly gone, his head filled with images of a young and vulnerable Blue trying to cope with an act of such deliberate cruelty.
"Here's the amazing bit," Sienna said. "According to Jonah, Blue still didn't cry. Not a single tear. Instead, she went to her room, and she stripped it back to bare bones. Then she dumped everything she didn't absolutely need on the street. Just threw it all away, to prove to that bitch that there wasn't anything she could do to Blue that would hurt her."
A chill swept down Eddie's spine, following by a wash of heat. The knowledge that Blue had been exposed to such targeted malice and squared up to it so powerfully made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
God, she was tough. Stronger than titanium. But he also knew that underneath that toughness, Blue would have been bleeding. She might never have sought comfort from anyone, but she would have mourned the loss of her precious memories privately. Deeply.
Emotion burned the backs of his eyes as he imagined Blue quietly choking down so much loss and hurt. She'd been a kid, completely alone. It hurt him to even think about it - but Blue had lived it. She'd survived it, all on her own.
It was so wrong, it made his gut and chest ache. It made him want to do something violent, something monumental enough to express his outrage that Blue had been dealt such a shitty hand by life. If he could, he'd tear down the world and remake it for her so that she had all the things she needed and deserved - parents who loved her, a childhood full of laughter, the knowledge that no matter what, she could always go home.
All things he and Raf had always taken for granted - things they didn't even know to value, because they'd always been there, part of the furniture.
If Blue would only let him close enough, he would do his best to make up for those losses in her life. He would make it his life's calling. His mission.
Across the room, Blue looked up and caught his eye. Her gaze was so bleak it jolted him out of his own thoughts, forcing him to remember why they were here.
Today was not about him and what he wanted. It was about Blue, and what she needed. Everything else could wait.
He pointed to the coffee urn, and Blue nodded.
He glanced at Sienna. "Can I get you a coffee?"
"No, thanks, I've already had so much tea I feel as though I'm going to float away. Anyway, I need to go check on Bree."
She headed over to the corner where Bree was playing quietly with another little girl. Eddie busied himself making coffee for Blue, tucking a couple of cookies onto the cup beside the saucer.
She made room for him when he joined her and the two men who had been monopolizing her for the last ten minutes.
"Eddie, this is Andrew and Jonah. They both lived at Alice's place when I was there."
"Some of us longer than others," Andrew said with a wry smile.
Eddie handed over the coffee and stood listening as they reminisced about Alice, burning with the need to put his arm around Blue's shoulders, to touch her in some way, but knowing that she wouldn't tolerate it.
Instead, he focused on the stories, and each new recollection hollowed out his chest a little more thoroughly.
The toughest thing was that the three people standing with him had no idea that their stories were sad. To them, they were funny. The time Alice used the cover from the phone book to patch a hole in the sole of Jonah's shoe until the next allotment of money came through from the government. The time Alice had them all on a roster washing sheets for the kid who couldn't get through the night without wetting the bed. The time they ate sausage stew every day for a week because the hot water service had blown and all the spare money had gone into buying a replacement.