“You throw the glass against the wall, then you clean it up and throw it away.That’s your practicality, Malcolm.”

“Sometimes a smashed bottle’s just a smashed bottle. Look, I’ve got to get the wheels back on this Jeep.”

It wasn’t anger he saw on her face, and her anger had been the goal. It was hurt. It was that single, unsteady breath.

She nodded once. “Good luck with that.”

For a moment, just as she turned to walk away, he wished he still had the beer bottle in his hand. Just so he could smash it again.

“I thought I was dead.”

She stopped, turned. She waited.

“When it went wrong, when I knew it was going south, I thought I could pull out of it. But the whole thing was f**ked. Technical glitch, miscalculation, and some budget cuts that didn’t get passed down to those of us on the line. Several people up the chain made a bad decision, doesn’t really matter why. The why’s the reason I ended up getting a big fat check at the end of the day.”

“The why’s the reason you got hurt.”

“Put it down to a clusterfuck.” That’s what he’d done. That’s what he’d had to do to get past it. “Anyway, I had that initial moment—gag’s gone south; then the next—I can deal. Then . . . then the next when I knew I couldn’t and thought I was dead. We’re talking seconds from one point to the next, but it all slows down.There’s noise—snatches and bursts—and outside this tunnel you’re in, it’s just a blur. But inside, everything’s slowed down so that few seconds is endless. And it’s goddamn terrifying. That’s before the pain.”

He had to take a breath, had to calm a little.While he did, she walked to the workbench and took out the bottle of water he’d tossed in with the beer.

She opened it, and with her eyes steady on his, handed it to him.

Jesus, he thought. Jesus, she was a piece of work. An amazing piece of work.

“Okay.” He cooled his throat. “After the pain, you know you’re not dead. You just want to be. Inside you’re screaming, and that sound’s barely human. You can’t get even that sound out when you’re choking on your own blood. When you can’t breathe because your lungs have started to collapse. It’s more than you can stand, those seconds, trapped in the pain, waiting to die. Wanting to so it’ll just end.

“What good does it do for you to know this?” he demanded.

“It’s part of you. We’re not blank slates, Malcolm. What we’ve done, what we’ve survived, all go into us.What happened to those girls, your reaction to it—”

“I don’t know why it hit me the way it did. Maybe because it had been a long day, maybe because it was close to home. I don’t flash back to my own crash every time I deal with a wreck. It’s not like that.”

“What is it like?”

“It’s over, or I wouldn’t be standing here. It started being over when I woke up in the hospital. Not dead. It’s a pretty big deal, not being dead, and I wanted to stay that way.”

He put the water down to get the broom and dustpan, and started sweeping up the broken glass.

“If it had to hurt like ten levels of hell, okay. I’d lived through the crash, I’d live through that. Need to put me back together with pins? Go right ahead, as long as I walked out of there. I started making plans to do that; it was a way to get through. No more living day to day.”

“You pushed the rewind button.”

He glanced back at her. “Yeah, in a way. Or maybe I switched to forward. But I knew when I woke up, and my mother was sitting there, when I saw her face, I knew I wasn’t going back. I’m not going to say I’m all she had, or has, because she’s more than that. But I could stop living the kind of life that put the rest of her family at risk that way. I got the chance to do something for her, and to move forward for myself.”

He sighed now, dumped the glass with a clatter into the trash. “She wouldn’t go home. Even when I got strong enough to yell at her, to piss her off, I couldn’t make her go.”

“Is that what you wanted?” she asked quietly. “Did you want her to go?”

“I . . . No. God, no. But I didn’t want her to stay the way things were either. She quit her job, picked up work waiting tables out there. I walked out on her when I was eighteen, that’s basically what I did. Sure I sent her money, but I could count on one hand the number of times I came back to see her. But she wouldn’t leave me alone. I got a chance to change things, and I took it. That’s all.”

“You’re very lucky to have your mother.”

“I know it.”

“And she’s fortunate to have you.”

“We do okay.”

“Malcolm, how would you define you and me? What we have going on?”

“How would you?”

“No, no, you get away with that too often.The question is on the table. Pick it up.”

“Jesus, Parker, sometimes it’s hard to follow you. I apologized for last night, and I gave you reasons. More than I like getting into.”

“Do I take that to mean you can’t define what we have?”

“I wasn’t looking to define it.” He picked the water back up, put it back down. “If I had to, I’d say we have a situation.”

“A situation.” Her breath came out on a laugh. “All right. Do you think I want to be in a situation with you and not know how you dealt with a trauma, how it affected you, how it—or you because of it—changed the direction of your life?”

“Clearly you don’t.”

“It’s important to you to know how things work. Well, I can’t know how you work, or how we might work, if I don’t have all the pieces.”

That hit home with him. “I get that, but I didn’t like all the pieces, so—like I’m doing with this Jeep—I modified them. I don’t run the same way I did before the crash. I don’t think we’d be in this situation if I did.”

“We’ll never know, but I like who you are, Malcolm, and that includes where you came from. I don’t want to feel like I’m intruding anytime I ask you a question about where you came from.”

“That’s not how I want you to feel. I just don’t like digging through the past. It’s gone.”