“He’s been telling literally everyone he runs into in the course of a day about it. Seriously—he made the gas station attendant yesterday promise he’d listen. Oh, and Celeste! I forgot to tell you we ran into her!”
“You did?” Anders paused, waiting for the requisite hollowing of his stomach or shadow of sadness to creep over him, as Kelsey droned on about spotting his ex across a crowded hibachi restaurant, but nothing happened. And it occurred to him—not unpleasantly—that he hadn’t thought about her in weeks.
“Look, I really do need to go. I’m at work.”
Anders hung up and stared at his phone for a beat, his mind back on his dad—not Leonard, of course, but his real dad, who still clearly had not listened to any of his podcasts. Who he hadn’t even heard from in months. As he was swallowing his disappointment, Jess brushed by him, bringing him back to himself.
“Hey, Jess.” He lifted his head so his voice carried over their cubicle divider. “Can you send me that police report when you get back to your desk?”
He had a podcast to record.
WHAT THE FRICK? Episode 7
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Hokie4Life: A murder! OK, I’m back in. [Image: Stephen Colbert eating popcorn]
Chapter 17
The Night Before the Storm
Piper stared at her husband as if he had sprouted a third eye. They were squared off against each other, the small kitchen table between them. She shook her head, trying to make sense of it all. “Tom, you can’t do it! Not like this.”
She had thought they’d put this crazy idea to bed months ago, so it was quite the surprise when he sprung it on her this evening, while she was studiously peering through her microscope lens at the venation in the wing of a dead dragonfly she had found on Graver’s Beach that day, trying to determine its exact classification.
“Pipes, I have to, can’t you see that? I can’t live like this anymore. We can’t live like this anymore. Do you know how many crabs I caught yesterday? Do you?”
Piper eyed him, her jaw set.
“Not even two bushels. And less than a dozen peelers.”
“Some days are like that. Some years, even,” Piper said. “You’ve seen worse. And you’ll see better. It’s like BobDan says—crabbing ebbs and flows—”
“Like the tide. Yeah, yeah. He thinks everything ebbs and flows like the tide.”
“Well, it does, really, Tom. That’s life.”
“No! That’s not life, Piper. That’s what I’m saying. That’s an excuse to sit back and do nothing—to just let life happen to you—like everyone on this island has been doing for centuries.”
Piper jerked her head back, narrowed her eyes. In a quiet voice, she said: “That’s not fair.”
Tom gripped the top bar of the ladder-back chair and leaned over, his knuckles turning white from the pressure. He looked up at Piper, his eyes rimmed red, his face more lived-in than most other twenty-four-year-olds’. “Look, don’t you want something . . . I don’t know. More?”
The truth was, Piper didn’t. From the moment she first laid eyes on Tom, she knew he was all she ever wanted. Needed. That if she could just be with him, she’d never want for anything else in life.
“Tom, you’re not hearing me. People aren’t going to just let this happen.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I have a plan.”
“Yeah, some plan,” she scoffed. “I know what it feels like to be a pariah, Tom. I’m not going to do it again.”
“A pariah? Piper, there’s not a more beloved person on this island than you. I mean, people practically bow to you on the street they love you so much.”
“Not always. Remember? When I first moved here. It was awful.”
“Piper.”
“Tom.”
They eyed each other, both barely breathing—and neither wanting to give in. Piper cracked first, reverting to her original point. “It’s a terrible plan! I told you this two months ago and my feelings haven’t changed. People will find out, Tom. And then what? When they find out—” She shivered. She couldn’t even finish the sentence. “Please don’t do this.”
“I have to. It’s time. And it’s the only way.”
Piper knew the look in Tom’s eyes. It was the same look he got when he woke up in the middle of the night with a fully formed plan for a better scrape design and immediately began drawing it out, or when he turned to her a year earlier, lying on the bottom of his skiff, and said, “We should get married.” She’d been with him for eight years, and in that time, she’d learned that when Tom got something in his mind, he moved forward like a speeding freight train that’d lost its brakes. Desperate, Piper grasped for something, anything that could stop him. “Think of your mother, Tom. Hasn’t she been through enough?”
His blue-gray eyes went stormy. “Piper,” he said, her name both a statement and a warning.
“What?” She leveled her gaze at him. “You haven’t thought this through—you’re not thinking about anyone but yourself.”
“Are you kidding right now? You’re kidding. Everything I do, Piper—everything!—is for my mother. For you. For everybody else in this freakin’ town.” He clenched his fists tight and raised them toward the ceiling, along with his gaze. Piper could see the veins in his arms, his neck, as he growled at the top of his lungs.
Tom glared at her once more, fire in his eyes, and then he abruptly straightened his spine to his full height and brushed past her, storming out the front door and letting the screen slam shut behind him.
Piper stood there for a minute, his words reverberating in her ears. She traced his steps to the door and stood at the screen, though Tom was long gone. And as much as she didn’t want to admit it, she knew Tom was right. He did put everyone else first, starting with her, as if it were encoded in his
