Shane slants a look at me, as if to determine my motivation for asking. Finally, he shakes his head. “I bought it at an auction with the money from my first win. I’d come home for Faith’s birthday.” He pushes the car into fifth gear. “It was an impulsive buy, but I thought…”
When he doesn’t continue, I prompt him, sensing he’s going to open up. “What did you think?” If he overheard what Faith told me, he already knows his rocky relationship with his father won’t be news to me.
“I thought if he could just see I’d been successful, that the time I’d spent away from the inn had paid off in some small way, it would change everything, but he wouldn’t even let me in the door.” He clears his throat. “I don’t drive it very often anymore.”
“You should,” I blurt, hating the defeat in his voice. “You should be proud of it even if he couldn’t manage it. Maybe buying the car was impulsive, but he should have seen it for what it was. Not a boast. An explanation…an apology. He should have known you better.”
Even though Shane isn’t looking at me, I can tell by his posture I’ve surprised him. I’ve kind of surprised myself at the close attention I’ve been paying without realizing it. When he doesn’t say anything for a long time, however, I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong. Or worse, I’ve overstepped my bounds.
“Look, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my place to say anything.” I pull my messenger bag higher against my chest. “I skipped Tact 101 in high school.”
A small smile playing around the edges of his mouth, he shakes his head. “How do you manage to see the best in everyone, Willa, but only the worst in yourself?” His statement lingers between us, as if I could pluck it out of the air. When I realize my mouth is hanging open, I snap it shut. That’s not true. Is it? “What you said about my father, this car…you’re right, I think. I’ve just never thought of what happened in those terms.”
“I’m an outsider looking in, that’s all. It’s easier to see a situation clearly without messy emotions, like guilt, in the way.”
“I don’t know. A moment ago, you seemed pretty outraged on my behalf.” I stare resolutely out the window and Shane sighs. “You wouldn’t be, if you knew the whole story.”
“Do you want to tell it to me?” I ask softly.
Our eyes meet across the console. “I don’t know.”
Ignoring the stab of hurt, I nod. “Okay. I get that.”
“No, you don’t.” He turns onto the highway, slipping into the fast lane with expert ease. “I liked the way you looked at me when you defended me. Maybe a little too much. When you realize I’m not worth your outrage, I run the risk of never seeing that again.”
The pain remains, but it’s transferred to him now. “It can’t be that bad,” I whisper.
We drive in silence for a few minutes. I sit very still in the passenger side, afraid if I move, it will sway his decision to confide in me. I want to know what put that note of sadness in his voice and I think I’ll be crushed if he decides against telling me. When I got off the plane in Dublin, I didn’t want to get close enough to anyone to feel this emotionally invested. I came here to repair myself and my broken heart, not this family. Just this one final thing, I tell myself. Just to put the curiosity to rest.
Shane’s voice startles me, cutting through the darkness. “I was in Malaysia in March, getting ready for the second race of the Championship. Hadn’t spoken to my father in months. But he called me. Just as I was suiting up for the qualifying round. I didn’t even look at the caller ID, just answered, assuming it would be anyone but him.” Shane isn’t completely there with me in the car anymore, his voice sounding far-off. “He’d hadn’t even let me past the front door of the inn last time I was in Dublin, so when he asked me to come home immediately, I didn’t understand. I asked if Kitty and Faith were all right. He said yes, but I needed to come home and see to my legacy. It had to be that same day.”
As he gets further into the story, a bad feeling settles on my shoulders, tingling in the back of my neck. Before I can analyze my actions or tell myself it’s a bad idea, I settle my hand over his on the clutch. He looks at our touching hands a beat before continuing.
“When I think back to the phone call, I don’t know how I missed it. He kept calling me by my name, which he never used to. Shane, it’s important that you listen. Shane, your mother and sister need you. No mention of him. None.” He steers the car off the highway and takes a turn, beginning the ascent of a semi-steep hill. “The next day, I placed in the top three. Not my first time, but it was a difficult track. I had a voicemail from Faith…”
He has to stop. The moment feels so fragile that any misplaced word or movement will shatter it like glass. I don’t want to hear the rest. I’ll die if I don’t.
“I went out celebrating. Didn’t even listen to the voicemail until the next day.” His voice has turned bitter, full of self-hatred. “He died during the race. He was trying to tell me to come home. Must have known what was coming. It was so obvious, I just didn’t want to f**king hear it.”
My chest rises and falls rapidly, every breath I manage to draw into my lungs more painful than the last. I try to imagine the guilt that goes along with what he’s telling me and I can’t even fathom it. I feel that I can at least partially relate, because as awful as my nonrelationship is with my mother, if something similar had happened with Valerie…if she died after begging me to come home, I would still be swamped with self-loathing. I can only imagine the magnitude of Shane’s. It’s visible now, in every line of his body, the white-knuckled grip he has on the clutch.
“So? Am I still the type of person you would defend?” Finally, he looks at me and I want to wither under the haunted expression he hits me with. “Or are you wishing you’d never gotten into this car with me?”
I inhale slowly, ordering myself to think clearly. Maybe I wanted to avoid this position, but my curiosity has landed me here and now I get the sense that I’m needed. That my response is important. More than that, it’s important to me that it leaves no room for doubt. “Yes, I’m defending you, Shane. I’m saying your father didn’t make it clear enough. He was too stubborn to come right out and tell you what the hell he wanted to say. He didn’t say, ‘Shane, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m dying and want you to come home.’ Instead, he left you with a lifetime of guilt. That’s shitty. And you’re making it shittier by imagining hints he probably never dropped.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re the one that’s still alive.” I realize I’m practically shouting and lower my voice. “Someone has to shoulder the guilt you both felt. It didn’t die with him.”
He stares at me hard for long, torturous seconds where I worry my honesty went too far. Then he leans back in his seat, staring out the front windshield. “I have to go back to racing. I have to win or it was all for nothing. I will have alienated him, my family, for nothing. Can you understand that?”
Better than I thought. “Yes,” I say, even though the word feels like it’s being scraped from my throat with a spoon. It’s a complicated and difficult goal, but that’s Shane. Complicated and difficult. People like us, he’d said to me the night we kissed in the office. We must be cut from the same cloth, because this quest he’s on is something I fully grasp. Maybe even something I would do in the same position.