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was because she convinced me it was in your best
interest to bring you back home. I don’t care –” Shad took a couple
of seconds to reconsider his words before proceeding with them. “–
So much about what your mom wants or what your dad wants. What
matters more to me is what you want.” He clasped his hands together
in front of his knees. “Did any of that make sense?”
    She studied him for enough seconds that Shad
started to wonder how he was going to manage trying to rephrase
that babble into something more comprehensible.
    “I want Mom and Dad back,” Charissa finally
said. “Together.”
    Shad looked down at his hands and blew out an
exhale. “You and a million other kids.” He looked at her again,
managing to bring his gaze as high as her nose. “I can’t do that. I
can’t make them get back together. So I have to come up with the
next best thing for you.”
    Charissa lowered her gaze again. “If Mom
wasn’t dying, they’d be together.”
    When Monica Simms first approached Shad about
getting Charissa back, he was initially interested in her situation
for two reasons. First, it reminded him of the story about Pap’s
great-great grandfather. When the potato famine of the 1840’s
struck Ireland, Quaid Delaney’s father abandoned the family because
he couldn’t bear to watch them starve to death. For the rest of his
life Quaid despised his father for this penultimate act of
cowardice. He was so outspoken about his opinion that to this day
getting called coward by a Delaney was equivalent to be
being called something rather excremental by anybody else. If
Demetri Simms could walk away from his wife and take their child
because he didn’t want them to watch her die, Shad initially
believed he might have the same color of belly as Quaid’s
father.
    The other reason was simply because there
could be a child’s welfare at stake, which was very much of the
foundation for why Shad had accepted the ludicrous idea of becoming
an attorney. At first he didn’t see much hope for Monica’s goal.
The couple was still legally married and Demetri didn’t have any
kind of criminal record, so Shad had little grounds to initiate a
custody battle.
    During his initial consultation with Monica,
however, Shad began to notice “red flags” in her description of
their relationship with Demetri. So he asked Monica certain
questions he’d devised whenever Shad wanted to verify if abuse was
an element in a case he was considering. Even though she didn’t
realize it herself, Monica confirmed Shad’s suspicions. If Demetri
could convince a woman in her twenties that she was “crazy,” Lord
knows what harm he could do to the mind of a child.
    Shad’s pet questions wouldn’t work on a
child, however, and he also had to take care that he neither led
Charissa nor set himself up for the accusation of contributing to
alienation of her father.
    “Why do you think that?” Shad simply
asked.
    “It’s a bad thing, dying.” Charissa looked up
at him.
    “Tell me what’s bad about dying.”
    Shad could read a river much more effectively
than he could people’s expressions, but he suspected the slight
frown that furrowed Charissa’s brow indicated she thought his
request was a bit odd. Then her gaze lowered to the day pack, and
her voice was softer when she spoke.
    “It’s bad people who die.”
    Shad was so consumed by all the ramifications
of that answer it took him probably thirty seconds to respond.
“Only bad people die? Don’t good people die too?”
    “If you’re good, you get to die when you’re
old.” Charissa didn’t look up. “If you’re bad, God makes you die
sooner.”
    On the one hand, it was a philosophy that
might offer comfort to a child. Wouldn’t the world be safer if all
the bad guys were struck down before they could harm the innocent?
On the other hand, it negatively judged everyone who faced an
untimely death.
    “Why do you believe that?” Shad asked.
    This time Charissa did raise