Just Like That - Cole McCade Page 0,8

did you guess?”

“Because it’s Fox. Not because of you.” His mother sighed gently and tucked his hair back with a lingering touch. “You were too young to know him before his wife died. We were actually fast friends, he and I, before he shut everyone out and isolated himself.”

Professor Iseya’s...wife? Summer lifted his head sharply, staring at his mother, his heart thumping in erratic sick-lurch rhythm. “He was married?”

“For some time when he was close to your age, yes.” She smiled, blue eyes dark, soft. “He was really the kindest, sweetest man...but when he lost Michiko, well...” She shook her head. “Loss and grief can change people.”

“When did this happen?”

“When you were...about four or five, I would say. Terrible tragedy, truly. She fell asleep behind the wheel one night on her way home from her job in Medford, and lost control of her car on the bridge over the Mystic. Her car sank right to the bottom of the river.” His mother bowed her head, lines seaming her round, soft features. “Fox was never the same after that.”

“I...oh.” Guilt plunged through Summer in a hard strike, sinking deep as a spear into his flesh. He knit his brows. “Why haven’t I ever heard about this?”

“You were quite young, dear, and it was grown-up business. And over time, the whole town learned to stop speaking about it out of respect for Fox. I don’t think the man’s ever stopped grieving.”

Or he never allowed himself to grieve in the first place, Summer thought with dawning realization.

And just like that, far too many things fell into place.

When he’d been a student at Albin, all he’d seen was Professor Iseya—aloof, untouchable, mysterious, his icy armor all the more fascinating for the secrets it promised. As a boy it had been too easy to daydream about being the one to tease past that armor to discover everything hidden inside; to be the special one the cold, somewhat frightening professor defrosted for. There’d been a touch of the forbidden, too, when Iseya had been nearly forty by the time Summer graduated, and that stern, subtly domineering demeanor had inspired a few whispered thoughts of just what he might do to Summer in private when Summer was young, vulnerable, inexperienced.

But those had been childish fantasies, entirely inappropriate and impossible, and suddenly that frigid exterior took on a wholly different meaning when seen through older eyes.

When it was the defensive shield of a man in pain, struggling to find a way to function in his everyday life, fighting his pride to keep from putting his grief on display for all the world to see.

Yet if Summer had been four or five years old when Iseya’s wife had died...then Iseya had been shut inside himself for twenty years, now.

And maybe Summer was reading too much into it, thinking a few psychology and education courses gave him any insight into the workings of a distant man’s mind...

But he wondered if Iseya even knew how to find his way out, anymore.

Or if he was trapped inside himself.

And completely alone.

Summer sighed, rubbing his fingers to his temples. “I’m an asshole.”

“Language.”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“And I’m still your mother, and this is still my house.” She reached across the table and curled her thin, papery fingers around his wrist; her skin was cooler than he remembered, and brought back that pang, that quiet unspoken fear, the entire reason he’d been willing to take a job in the town he’d once been so desperate to escape. “You didn’t know, Summer. Now you do. It’s up to you what you do with that information.”

“Yeah...yeah. I know.” He smiled and caught her hand, squeezing it in his own. “I’ve got to think for a bit, but... I think I know what I need to do, in the end.”

“What’s that, dear?”

“I,” he said, holding her hand just a little tighter, as if he could give her his warmth to hold and keep, “am going to do something brave.”

And he couldn’t think of anything that would take more courage than walking up to Fox Iseya...

And apologizing to him flat out.

* * *

Fox sat on the shore of Whitemist Lake and watched the sun rise over the spires of the school.

The mist always made sunrise at Albin Academy a strange and silvered thing, when the thick blanketing layer of fog rose almost to the treetops and captured the sun to glow strange and ethereal about the edges. The mornings tasted cool as rain, and every blade of grass around him clung on