"Is it a love letter, Mummy?" Daisy asked, making me jump slightly, for a moment too caught up in my own world to remember she was sitting there.
I mentally shook myself and slipped the note into my back pocket and then turned to face my daughter. I offered her a beaming smile and nodded towards the birdhouse.
"Did you do this all by yourself?" I asked.
"Nah, Adam and Ben helped. That Nick guy just gave instructions from a deckchair."
I laughed. That sounded about right.
"Well, you all did a great job. Where's it going?"
"In our backyard," she declared, and I wondered if we'd ever get back to our two bedroom flat in Grey Lynn. "I'm gonna ask deetetiv Pierce to hang it up."
So determined to include Pierce in our lives. I blinked down at her, as she toyed with the latch on the door to the 'house'. Unsure exactly what to say to that.
Was it wrong of me to want Ryan in our lives too? Was I setting Daisy up to be hurt? I didn't know the answer, and now was not the time to work it out.
"OK, sweetheart, we'll see," I said instead.
"Oh, we'll see all right, Mummy. Yes we will."
I guess I'd just been told, hadn't I?
Chapter 19
Yeah, I'm Ready, Babe
The note felt heavy in my back pocket as I sat between Abi and Kelly in the rear of an SUV. I should have read it as soon as Ben handed it over. Reading a 'love letter' in front of my daughter was one thing, reading it in front of these two women was something else entirely. I felt like it was burning a hole into my left butt cheek, I kept squirming in my seat trying to assuage the imaginary ache.
"You got ants in your pants?" Kelly asked on my left.
"Or do you need to pee?" Abi offered from my right.
"Could be excitement over seeing Pierce again," Eva suggested from the front passenger seat, receiving an arched brow from Nick who was driving.
Ben muttered a "Fuck me" in the back of the vehicle, making up the entirety of our little retrieval group.
"I'm fine," I muttered, ruining my defence when I squirmed in my seat again. Argh! I should just get the damn thing out and read it. The desire to find out what Ryan had written was so great, but the longer I took before I did so, made me begin to doubt it was a love letter at all.
What if it was just a note explaining the retrieval was back on for tonight. He'd obviously changed his mind about it, and may have done so before he left Ben and Abi's house. The note was to catch me up on the plan.
Yeah, that was probably it. The squirming stopped and the hand wringing began instead.
"I used to feel an itch between my shoulder blades," Abi said into the quiet air of the car.
I saw Nick's eyes come up to the rear vision mirror, they caught mine, but I think he'd been intending to see what expression was on Abi's face. Eva swung around in her seat.
"Do you still get it?" she asked.
"Not so much," Abi advised. Ben's hand snaked between us from the rear and squeezed her shoulder once, then disappeared. She offered me a small smile. "Bullseyes and shoulder itches, when my world was uncertain they kept me sane." An amused sound escaped her lips then. "Well, as sane as you could be when paranoid."
"I'm not paranoid," I pointed out, although softly, not wanting to offend.
"Paranoia. Fear. At times like this they're one and the same."
I was scared. I'd denied myself that emotion for so long that now I felt it again it threatened to consume me. I stared down at my white knuckled hands clasped together, felt the moist sheen of sweat on my palms, noticed the slight trembling in my extremities. Yes, I was scared, but not of anything tangible. Not of, say, the tattooed freak jumping out from behind the bar at the Birdcage and attacking. This fear was more elusive than that. This fear was something you couldn't fight. When there's no physical opponent, how do you throw a punch?
I was walking down a bleak and dark corridor into my past, revisiting aspects I'd long since buried beneath my shields. Exposing painful memories, rifling through a shoebox full of photos in my mind. I knew what I'd find. I knew what it would do to me. But I couldn't stop this now. Too many people knew about the ledger. Too many people wanted it.
Hell, Pierce and Nick were humouring me by letting me be the one to retrieve it. Ryan because he felt something for me. Nick because Ryan was a friend. Both of them could have just gone ahead and searched for the book on their own. Without me. But they were letting me face my past. Letting me put it right. I wanted to be grateful, and in a way I was, but the past was looming and the closer I got to it the more detail I could see.
Blood splatter. Gun smoke. Screams and tears and heartache. So much fear I couldn't breathe.
On one side of me Abi reached out and wrapped a hand around one of mine. On the other Kelly did the same, until both my hands were being held by the two women with me. They didn't say anything, they just offered what support they could in the face of my haunted past.