Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,137

it filled my mind. My thoughts and his scream became one and the same.

It was that cry that shook away my fear and thrust me forward into the next of what life held for me. The cry was the punctuation that acknowledged the terribleness of what had gone before, and gave it a stopping place past which I might believe things would be better.

I got to my feet, planting them against the stone. Someone had me by the arm. I shifted TJ to my hip, and as if to declare the Olmsteads had never claimed me, said, “I’m Jill Wagner.”

Chapter 33

Cade

For the past couple hours especially I’ve had some time to think about my regrets with regard to the current situation. When they put me on the phone with this guy, Dave Robinson, he said to me, “Don’t you think Jill’s been through enough the past few years, losing her mom and all, without you making threats on your own life now? That’s kind of selfish, don’t you think?” I gave that some real thought. I knew Dave had her best interests at heart and had helped her a lot previously. Jill had told me all sorts of wild stories about the kinds of people they taught at that camp, crazy paranoid types who live in the woods in their vans, and it irked me to think Dave might think he was dealing with that kind of individual when he was talking to me. I’m not like that at all. I’m a reasonable person. So in talking to him I tried to kind of meet him halfway, because after all this is over I hate thinking he’ll be talking to Jill about what happened and have negative things to say about me.

When he said that about her mom, though, what came into my head was this: the thing I pity Jill over, more even than what happened with her mother, is that she’s an only child. I mean, every family has its issues, its sad circumstances and crises they never saw coming, but there’s also people you can look in the eye and know that they’re carrying it with you. Whatever happened in my own family, I could sit with Elias and know he thought the same of it as I did. Candy, she’s added her own share to that whole pile, but at least I knew the Olmstead business was her burden, too, whether she liked it or not. Jill never had that. The whole thing with her mother dying, she had to deal with it all on her own. They say no man is an island, but Jill pretty much is an island. It’s kind of hard to watch, like when you see a woman carrying a really heavy suitcase and she keeps insisting she doesn’t want your help in getting it across the airport.

My regret is that it’s looking as if I won’t get the chance to give my son a brother. I can’t really put to words the ache that comes with just thinking about that. If they burst into the house and kill me, or if I do it myself, or if I step out that door and start shooting down the driveway so I at least go out in a battle instead of cornered in my own home—any way this ends, TJ’s going to have to carry it, and there’s no way around that. Only a brother could make that any lighter.

So I’ll put it out there as my final statement, these two messages to those two people I love most.

Thomas Jefferson Olmstead, if you take away one noble thing from the deeds I did on this earth, let it be that I chose to stand in opposition to the full crushing force of the Government of the United States of America—its history and rule of law and sheer power to enforce its will—to right a roaring injustice done to my family. I would have done the same for you. For you I would have stood against the entire world.

And Elias Olmstead, for the wrongs I did you, and for the love I cost you, know that I always believed that among family we struck the bargain with our loyalty. I’m paying up now. And if I see you on the other side of this, I hope you’ll call it even.

Epilogue

Jill

Nobody had told me about the magic of a toddler’s first spring. Through the long months of winter TJ grew used to the skeletal