"You don't think that I'm broken?" he asked with sad irony, backing away. "Shattered. Splintered. Split. Broken. Aren't they all the same? Would it have been suicide or murder, Trissa? Tell me that."
His eyes looked so dead to her with none of the spark she loved as Nicholas' and no trace of the intensity she now recognized as Cole's. The hollowness of his voice and the emptiness of his eyes tore at her heart. She feared she may lose them both, and she knew she could not survive that. She lay her hand on his as it gripped the gun so casually at his side and was alarmed that it felt so cold, as cold as the gunmetal itself. "Don't. Don't do this to me, please."
"For you. I was doing it for you, Trissa."
"Did you give me back my life to take it from me again?" She covered his gun hand with her own and moved closer to him.
"Stop, Trissa."
He tried to push her away, to release her, but she would not let him. She pressed her ear against his chest. For a moment, she held her breath, listening to his heart, wanting it to go on forever, fearing he would not let it. "Please, please, don't take yourself away from me. I don't want to live without you."
"I can't live without you," came Cynthia's voice, an echo of Trissa's, whispering across his mind, and he saw again Cynthia's cold, little body wrapped in the quilt, deep in her dark, lonely grave. "God, no. No, Trissa, you don't understand." The memory struck again and it was Trissa's face he saw. His legs buckled and he slumped through her embrace to his knees. He relinquished the gun to her grasp alone. "God, Trissa, help me. I can't go on like this. I can't."
She knelt with him, carefully sliding the gun away from them across the ground.
"It's empty," he said. "It's empty." But she did not understand.
With her hands on his temples, she searched his eyes and saw Nicholas there. "Remember. Remember, Nicholas, how you held me in the hospital? How you told me the world needed me, you needed me? I didn't believe it then. I didn't know how to believe it. But now..." She kissed his forehead and the corners of his eyes. "Now, I believe. You taught me. As Nicholas. As Cole. You taught me how to love and be loved. I need you. The world needs you. We need the magic. Your magic."
*****
Magic. It was the wrong word. It conjured up Doreen and Janey and Cynthia, and all the magic he had sought in them to sear away the memory of his childhood, to dispel the shadows and the darkness that waited to swallow him. He would spare Trissa that magic. He did not believe in it anymore. He did not want it anymore.
It was as if the illusion he'd chased for so long had cracked and shattered within him, falling away in slivers like a broken mirror. His arms circled her and he held her, so warm and real and solid, so much more than magic. From deep within him came the words she had whispered to him the first time they'd made love, "Keep me safe, Trissa. Never let me go."
"Never," she promised as he had then. "Never."
Chapter Twenty
Bryant Edmonds called on Trissa the next day waving the newspaper account of the arrest of Edie Kirk for the murder of her husband. He was eager to point out the phrase that described Nicholas as the alleged common law husband of the daughter of the accused.
"So?" Trissa snapped. "Are you surprised? You've been alleging that all along, haven't you? One of the few parts of the story you got right, I might add."
"Nobody's been proven guilty or innocent yet," he growled.
"That being the case, you'd best run along, Dr. Edmonds. You wouldn't want to taint your reputation by associating with libertines and murderers, would you?"
Edmonds ignored the warning and returned to the article. "'Mrs. Kirk allegedly struck her husband several times with a shovel when he returned from disposing of the unconscious Nicholas Brewer who confessed he had fought with Mr. Kirk earlier that evening. In her statement to the police, Mrs. Kirk admits having witnessed the fight from an upstairs window of their home, and seeing her husband put Brewer's body in the trunk of his own car but says she has no memory of the events that followed when Kirk returned