#I don't typically bold my dialogue but there's a lot of dialogue interruption going on here so

[julie-hollis]

Julie cast Shawn a glance at her series of questions. The difference between Shawn and the rest of her friends was this: Shawn knew about the Cowboy Mafia. The difference was only one of them got to choose to live on the fringes -- witnessing as their loved ones eyes filled with the shadows of demons that would always be strangers. For Julie that loved one was Caid; for Shawn that loved one was her father and the only parent she ever had. Julie chose to be with Caid. Shawn was born to it.

She tried to think back on the day Shawn was asking her about. "Before you judge my memory of this, just remember that I drove to Canada without stopping. I don't know how I was upright; never-mind, able to have a coherent conversation," Julie said with a shake of her head. Adrenaline was a helluva drug. She did remember falling asleep at the hospital at some point and waking up to sunlight and Caid explaining that the nurses took pity on her and hadn't kicked her out.

"He didn't really have to tell me. I saw," hospital gowns only cover so much, "I would say for the first half of that conversation I was remembering something Meema told me," Julie kept it vague with a wave of her hand. Meema warned her to never go to Roadrunner Repairs for the truck. She didn't trust the mechanics or most of the truckers that wound up there. "I realized she was right and not just being paranoid. Then, I felt a little scared for him. I just remember thinking that maybe he would have listened to me if we had been together. I thought maybe I could have stopped him so things would be different."

Julie knew in that moment that Caid would never have a normal life. There would always be a certain amount of living on the edge of a knife, that some shred of evidence, or ghost from the past would appear. Was a criminal only a criminal unless they got caught?

"There are times, even now, that I wonder: will it ever get to the point that I can't overlook or rationalize it and that he changes to me?" Julie shrugged. "That decision and the one I made, they're not ones I would recommend anyone else to make. I don't think it's possible to understand the gravity of it until you're already in and by then there's no changing it."

~~*~~

"Fair enough," she rolled her eyes with a grin. She wasn't an authority on what Julie was feeling, only on what Shawn saw during that entire period of their lives. And she understood ignoring feelings more than she really wanted to admit. In lots of ways. To her own credit, and Julie's since she felt this was something they had in common, they were loyal to a fault once they did admit something to themselves. Though they had never questioned what they meant to each other really.

The way Julie read her thoughts for what was coming next though made her smile even if her brow furrowed. She was right, Shawn really hated being fussed over. As Julie also probably knew, it was more because she hadn't experienced it much and now she just didn't know how to respond to it. Kind of like being cold and getting in a hot shower, it stung. "Yea, I probably would," she admitted with a shrug. Hadn't she been thinking similar things just the other day? About her regrets, or rather, regrets she didn't want to live with?

Since Julie had brought it up though, there was something else that had been tugging at her mind lately. The idea of actually joining the fight truly versus on the fringes. "But, you know, I've never asked you what that conversation looked like with Caid. How..." she chewed on her lip trying to find the words, "What...what did you think? When Caid told you?"