“I know,” I said.
After a moment, he said, “Did your old man cheat on you, too?”
“He did,” I said.
“Pretty shitty thing to do to someone who loves you, huh?”
“About as shitty as it gets,” I said. That, and trying to kill them, too, which was what Danny had tried to do in the end, with the help of a vampire named Hanner.
I saw something else in his mind. I saw his wife apologizing over and over. I saw her weeping, begging. I saw her phone calls and the texts. Her appearing at his work, at the apartment he had moved into.
“Who was the guy?” I asked.
“Her old boyfriend. A friend of mine, too. We go back to high school, all of us.”
“Are they together now?”
“No,” he said quickly, and looked very uncomfortable talking to me. “Elise said it was a mistake.”
Relax, I thought.
He nodded and took a deep breath, cracked his neck, and sank a little deeper into his seat. We could have been two friends lounging on a couch, playing X-Box in our basketball shorts.
Not that relaxed, I thought.
He nodded and sat up a little, unaware that I was prompting him with my suggestions.
“Why did she do it?” I asked, and added telepathically: It’s okay to talk to me, I’m a friend.
He looked at me, cocked his head slightly, nodded. He really didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, I was fairly certain, outside of a few close guy friends and family, he hadn’t talk about it at all.
“We were fighting. I left in a huff. I said something stupid.”
“How stupid?”
“I told her I should never have married her. That it was a mistake, and that I might go look up an old girlfriend.”
“That’s a whole lot of stupid in a row,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “So then, Elise calls her ex-boyfriend.”
“And the rest is history,” I said.
He nodded.
“And now, you won’t forgive her?” I asked.
“Did you forgive your old man?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t give me a chance. He moved on. But I have forgiven someone else...and it’s not easy.”
“My mom says once a cheater, always a cheater.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe not. No one knows the future. People make mistakes. People learn from their mistakes.”
He shrugged, still uncomfortable despite my mental prompting. As we sat there, and as I considered what to say to him, if anything, three entities materialized in the booth behind him. Small entities, although they were too fuzzy to make out any real details.
Kids, I realized. Unborn kids. Which was a first to me. I had seen the spirits of the departed...but never the not-yet-born. Until now.
“You wanted to build a family with her.”
“Yes.”
“Her and only her,” I said.
“Elise was my everything,” he said. “I screwed it all up. And she sure as hell didn’t help.”
Now the smallish spirits slipped over the both and pushed up next to him. One sat on his lap, except he didn’t know it, of course. I watched in amazement as another crawled up onto his shoulder and the third, the girl, curled under his arm. He shivered.
“Do you still love her?” I asked after a moment.
“Yeah,” he said. He looked away, fighting the tears, jaw quivering. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”
“Maybe I’m easy to talk to.”
“Maybe.”
It’s okay to cry, I told him.
And he did now, but not very hard. It wouldn’t be very becoming for the town sheriff to weep loudly at the little coffee shop. But the tears flowed anyway, silently; he didn’t bother to wipe them away.
“Yeah, I love her, but I can’t...” He cried a little harder now, and this time, he did reach up to wipe his cheeks and eyes. “I can’t forgive her, Ms. Moon. I can’t. I don’t know how to. I just don’t...know how...”
One or two people looked over at us. I telepathically told those one or two people to mind their own business. They did, turning their backs to us.
I considered what to do, even as the spirits swarmed around the grief-stricken man. Their future father. One even tried to wipe the tears from his face, and I knew what I had to do.
* * *
Give me your hands, I told him.
He blinked rapidly, eyelashes beaded with tears, then held out both of his hands. Thick, calloused hands.
Look at me. Good. Now, can you hear me?
“Yes.”
Speak to me only in your mind.
Like this?
Yes. Good.
I slipped deeper into his consciousness, and pushed through the pain and confusion and lost and hurt, deeper than I had any right to be.
There, buried under the jealousy and grief was something bright and glowing and spinning slightly. I knew what this was from my experience with Russell, my boyfriend from two years ago, the man who had inadvertently become my love slave. Of course, finding Russell’s higher self or soul had been a lot harder, for it had been buried deep, deep beneath the curse that was, well, me.
Sheriff Stanley was only a few layers down, although his grief was real and, if left unchecked, it would be lifelong. Grief like this would, I assumed, give him issues for the rest of his life, from distrust of other women to never feeling secure and loved and worthy.
And so, I spoke to him directly, to this higher aspect of himself. I told him to find the courage to let it all go, to find the courage to forgive her and to accept the responsibility of his own actions. I reminded him that he had a family to build with her, and with my words, I flamed his love for her back to life. The love was real, and it was deep, and it was easy to flame to life.
Most important, I told him to forget he ever met me. When I was done, when I slipped back out of his mind and found myself sitting across from him again, I released his hands and sat back.
He blinked, blinked again, then said, “I have to go.”
“Figured you did,” I said, and grinned.
He stopped as he was getting out of the booth. “Wait, who are you?”
I waved him away. “I’m not really here, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
And then, he was gone, dashing through the coffee shop to, I assumed, his wife. The three staticy, small entities trailed after him. They were holding hands and skipping.
Chapter Twelve
I was at the park ranger station just outside Arrowhead.
This time, I made it a point to get to the point. My last meeting had gone precisely nowhere, although I might have helped to salvage a relationship. And helped to build a family.