Damn it all.
She was only nineteen f*****g years old, he wanted to yell. And his father had only been fifty when he’d been shot five years later, leaving Jake to deal with the mess left behind, both in the department and at home.
Like a huge black wave, grief threatened to overwhelm him. At the funerals and every other damn time the pain threatened, he’d used anger to push it back down. Anger at his mom for driving drunk that night. Anger at the damn doctors that got Becca hooked on those pain meds. Anger at his father for giving up while his family disintegrated around him—for walking right into a bullet.
When Thea slid from that piece into another that they had all played together, the mournful “Ashokan Farewell,” he gave up. Urged on by Thea’s flute and that ghostly fiddle in his hea
