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Prologue / Kevin


“GOD DAMN IT, KEVIN, ALL SHE WANTS IS YOU!”

The words were still ringing in my head, as sharp and resounding as they'd been when Nick had first screamed them. I could still see the people turning and staring all around us, surrounded by the reflection of neon lights in the rain puddles on the street. The memory of the way his voice had collided with the night sent my stomach into knots.

I'd walked away.

I was still walking.

Running.

I realized it and let myself slow to a stop and looked around, a stitch in my chest tightening, and found my way to a stone wall a few feet away in front of a tall bank building. I sat on the damp stone and shook my head as I tried to gather together my thoughts.

“There's no telling what this person is after… No telling what she wants.”

“She doesn't want anything.”

“She must want something or she wouldn't be here!”

“God damn it, Kevin, all she wants is you!”

I half expected Nick to have followed me, but he hadn't, and the street was empty now as the words continued to echo through every fiber of my brain. There weren't even cars passing by. It was as though the world had isolated me. Like I'd been put into a corner for all the bad things I'd done.

Too much had happened too quickly, too many things had unraveled. I rubbed my forehead with my knuckles and wondered how I'd ended up here. It felt surreal, as though I had somehow fallen out of my own time-space dimension and landed some place else, some alternate universe where things as I knew them were fucked to hell. The thing was, it all made perfect sense – every bit of it. I just couldn't wrap my mind around it.

I needed solid, tangible evidence.

And I knew where I needed to go to get it.

I stood up and walked back the way I'd come. The street in front of the club was full of loitering people now, one girl puking her brains out over the side of a city trash bin while another teetered in five inch heels, holding her hair out of the way. Nick wasn't anywhere in sight. I didn't know if he'd gone back inside or left or what.

I walked down the street a little ways, where a pink taxi was idling at the curb, the driver flicking through a copy of The Tennessean. He looked up when I opened the back door and folded the pages quickly. “Where to?” he asked, a thick accent of some sort bending it's way through his words.

“Louisville, to start,” I replied.

The cabbie stared at me in the rearview mirror, an incredulous expression on his face. “You know you're in Nashville?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“It's like a...” he paused to do the math, “...four hundred dollar fare,” he said.

“That's fine,” I replied.

He thought about it a moment. “You know, you could fly for less?”

“That's fine. I need time to think.”

“You got cash?” he asked.

I reached into my pocket, withdrew my wallet and handed him several hundred dollar bills.

He looked at the money in his hand, then back at me, then shrugged, turning around, obviously baffled but not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He started the cab and I leaned back against the seat, and closed my eyes tight.




It was raining by the time we got to Irvine. The windshield wipers on the cab squelched as they pushed the water across the glass and the tires splashed through muddy puddles as he came to a stop. He looked around uneasily. “Wait here,” I said.

I got out of the cab and closed the door. Grass smushed under my feet as I walked through the mirth, past the old tree we used to climb, around the stones that dotted the earth. Names I knew were chiseled on them – names of shop owners and friends of my parents. A morning fog was cloistering the cemetery, and I moved through it, strangely aware that mine was the only heartbeat around. My father's stone was a few feet to the left, along with the plot that I would one day be lowered into, headed by a large family stone with no dates yet carved beneath my name. Memories ached from my brain straight through my body, like that feeling when you breathe cold air and it burns in the lungs.

We'd spent hours here, among the dead, talking about philosophy and life and all the things you think of when your entire world's been overturned by loss. We'd made fun of the fact that should one of us die, we'd always know where to find each other.

Her family's stone was as tall as my family's but the dirt in front of her's wasn't fully reclaimed by the earth yet and the grass was too green, too fresh, and I stopped too far back to see the dates beneath her name, but too close to deny they would be there, and I covered my mouth with my hand.

“Fuck.”

The word hung in the air in the cloud that my breath created.

“Fuck.”

I took a couple steps closer, tentative, and knelt down to one side of the stone. I reached up and ran my finger tips over her name, feeling the dips in the stone, the beveling beneath my fingers making it even more real. Acid crawled about in my stomach.

“You can't ignore this.”

“I'm not ignoring it, I'm saying it seems… convenient.”

“Convenient?”

“Yes, damn it! I mention some girl I dated a hundred years ago and a week later… this? It seems convenient.”

“She didn't know who you were.”

“Convenient.”

“Fucking stop saying that word!”

“Nick, think about it!”

“I am thinking about it!”

“There's no telling what this person is after… No telling what she wants.”

“She doesn't want anything.”

“She must want something or she wouldn't be here!”

“God damn it, Kevin, all she wants is you!”

My full palm was pressed against the stone, right over the newly carved dates. I closed my eyes. “I'm sorry,” I said thickly. “I didn't know.”