the back of the truck and headed straight for the garage. I took off after him. “What the hell is that?” I asked.
He was already at the door, knocking. Daniel flinched when he opened it, scowling at me over Tyler’s shoulder. “You called Tyler? What the hell, Nic?”
Then he saw what was in Tyler’s hand, just as I had. A goddamn jackhammer.
“Let him finish, Nic. He already started,” Tyler said, walking into the room, his eyes slowly taking it all in, then drifting closed. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
I threw my hands in the air. “You’re both completely out of your minds.”
“We have to know,” Daniel said.
“No, we don’t!” I said. I had my head in my hands, searching for understanding, for answers. “Why is this happening? How did this happen?”
Daniel slammed the spade into the concrete. “You’re not asking the right questions. You want to know why and how, and you’re getting strangled by it! Listen to what Dad’s saying. Don’t sell the house. What do you think he means? He means this. The garage floors. It wasn’t me. I came in one day after, and they were just done.”
“That doesn’t mean it was him. It doesn’t mean he did it,” I said, storming out of the garage.
I slammed the door on them, the thunder directly overhead, muffling the sound of the jackhammer. Daniel had emptied the garage, and all the material sat behind it, out in the rain. The gardening supplies, the tools, the wheelbarrow.
I grabbed the wheelbarrow and pushed it back to the door, silently cursing them, and myself, and my dad, and Corinne for disappearing in the first place. Tyler and Daniel paused to stare at me when I threw open the door again. I started picking up chunks of concrete, hauling them into the wheelbarrow. “Well? What should I do with this?” I had my hands on my hips, trying to focus on the task. Just the task.
Tyler met my eyes. “Back of my truck,” he said.
I wheeled it out into the rain, lifted the tarp, and hauled the pieces underneath, my hands turning chalky, like Daniel’s. When I turned back for the garage, Tyler was standing a few feet away, watching me. “You should go to Dan’s place,” he said. The rain fell from his hair, soaked his clothes, came down in a torrent between us.
“Did he send you out here to tell me that?”
He stepped closer, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face in the dark, in the rain. “Yeah, he did.” Another step. “Look, it might be nothing.”
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here.”
He came closer, put a hand on the truck behind me. Dropped his head, letting out a breath I could feel on my forehead, resting his own against mine for a second. “I’m here because you called me. It’s as simple as that.” And then his lips were sliding over mine in the rain, my back against his truck, and my fingers were in his hair, pulling him impossibly, desperately closer, until the jackhammer started up once more. “I’m sorry,” he said, pushing himself away. “I wish we could go back.”
My hands were shaking. Everything about me was shaking, and the rain was coming down harder.
“You really should go,” he said, striding back to the garage with his head tucked down.
I should’ve listened. I wanted to. I wanted nothing more.
But it wasn’t fair to them or Corinne. I had to bear witness. I had to pay my debts.
* * *
THE NEXT FEW HOURS consisted of Daniel and Tyler dislodging fragments of the floor and me moving the pieces in a wheelbarrow to Tyler’s truck, all of us covered with white powder.
None of us spoke. None of us came close to touching each other again.
The floor was in pieces, and Tyler stood back, hands on his hips, breathing heavily with exertion. The earth was exposed and waiting. Tyler got a shovel from his truck, Daniel used the one in the corner, and I used the garden spade from out back, softening the earth until it crumbled, coming up in chunks.
The only sounds were our breathing, shovels hitting earth, dirt hitting dirt, and rain and thunder.
And from deep in my memory, Corinne’s words in my ear, the scent of spearmint, her cold fingers, and my skin rising in goose bumps as I dug in once more, hitting something that was not earth, not rock.
My fingers reached in, touched plastic, and I jerked back. Used my shaking hands to brush