The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Nineteen

I had thought to myself that dawn among the flashing police lights and my father's grave face that I would never go back to France for as long as I lived. Damned if it was where I was born, damned if it was where I had grown up, damned if it was where all the memories of my mother remained. Standing there with blood on my hands, I had felt such a burning hatred for the place that I had never even wanted to ever think about it again.

And then we had buried Caitie and Parker in Cannes, and I was here again.

I went to Parker's grave first, because I knew I wouldn't have it in me to visit him after Caitie's. I sat at the edge of it, facing his gravestone, my hands in my lap, and opening my mouth only to discover that I had absolutely no idea what to say.

Parker had been my best friend for years, the absolute best of any that I had ever had. Despite the recoil of finding out he was an agent, placed there to protect me, he was still the same person I had gotten to know, and he still cared about me as much as I cared about him, so it had always stayed the same. It had always been him I could rely on with anything, Parker that got me through the worst of my panic attacks. I was the one he would call to talk about his mysterious girlfriend, the one he was crazy about and was super smart but also the most frustrating person on the planet.

He might not have always been there physically, but he was always there when I called him. He might have hated Caitie Alastair, but I forgave and understood him for that. He might have been the one to dump Caitie out of a helicopter, giving her a traumatic brain injury, but he had been caught in Woodburn's web the same way we all had been.

Parker and I had our days where we didn't get along, where we didn't agree on something important, but that didn't stop making us friends. That didn't lessen any of the horror I felt when that shot went off, and I knew I would be seeing his face in the back of my mind for the rest of my life, still recoiling at the acceptance that crossed his face moments before Shawn pulled the trigger.

Parker had kind of easily gotten lost in the scramble of the Helford trials. He blended into the background the same way Marci did, in a way—like collateral damage. Woodburn and Shawn and Caitie had eclipsed him, and it was kind of nice to just take a moment and sit there and remember that he was real, that he existed, and damn did I miss him.

Parker was one of the most loyal agents to protecting people in the Underground. He was always the person that wanted to do the best he could. And he died for us that day, all so we would have a little extra time to run.

Parker was a lot of a thankless hero, although he would have hated the thought of being remembered that way. It didn't matter to me—it wouldn't change the way I saw him, and I still admired his spirit and strength more than he ever would have wanted me to.

So maybe that's why I didn't have a lot of words. He never would have wanted to hear them, anyway, and I never would have said them out loud. Maybe that was the best explanation I had for someone outside of my mind to understand why I sat by his grave for a half hour in nothing but dead silence, not even bothering to speak as I touched the top of it in farewell before wandering away, my head held down, missing him more than I would like to let on.

And then I walked to where we had laid Caitie to rest.

Really, even that was a bit of a lie—the grave, for the most part, was empty. We buried an empty box, because we couldn't stomach the thought of only having a piece of her in there, even though it would have been more than empty air. Instead, we had buried things that had made us think of her, things that represented our good memories, like some kind of time capsule we would never dig back up.