by Snow, Nicole
“I don’t believe it.” Slowly, she starts working again, using just the tips of her fingers now, prodding at the scar like she’s trying to soften a hard-packed knot of dough.
Her voice drops to a soothing, intimate murmur, and yeah, I can hear the music in it, now.
I hear how she might sing, even though she’s never let me listen yet.
“What makes you so sure?” I wonder.
“Injuries like this, they can be managed. You’ll never be a hundred percent cured, but you can always get yourself back to a workable state as long as you start taking care of yourself and don’t stop.” Her gaze flicks to me, and once again I’m struck by how she seems older than her years. “That’s what most people don’t get. They think it’s a short-term thing, and one day they can quit, but they never can.”
“Sounds like a prison sentence.” I smile faintly. “But I guess I’d deserve one since I’m guilty of giving up.”
“No. You don’t seem like the type to give up for good,” she says. “More like you just got tired and took a break.”
I snort, wishing I could have her faith in me.
I’m clueless what to say, so I don’t say anything.
Just let her do her thing.
I close my eyes while those soft hands take my pain and tease it out of me like she’s a snake charmer and she’s got every last bit of me coiled around her mystic fingertips.
Somewhere in the silence, it happens.
I slip away into memories.
Another time, another place, when I couldn’t do a single damn thing to stop the worst from happening.
Couldn’t stop the hurt that’d turn my little girl into the living fury she is now, the reason why all her pain is every bit as justified as my own.
* * *
Four Years Ago
I don’t know why we’re planning a family vacation.
No, not true, I do know why.
Dammit, I know, and the reason is upstairs packing her bags in a whirlwind, excited about getting to camp out in Glacier National Park for the next two weeks.
We’re trying for Andrea, not for us.
I’m not sure there’s even an “us” left, when Abby and I haven’t been seeing eye to eye for a good, long while.
It wasn’t just Ma, always sticking her nose in everything early on and trying to tell me how bad Abigail was for me.
It wasn’t just that my stubborn ass didn’t want Ma to be right, when catching her getting up close and personal with my fuck-shit traitor of a brother not so long ago all but proves Ma is right.
Christ, we can’t even afford this stupid trip. Abby spent every last bit of money I brought home, every last bit of her own check, all on this online shopping stuff. Pure impulse spending.
Next thing I know, Andrea’s fully funded college account is half empty but there are two shiny cars in the garage, one sitting there waiting until she’s old enough to drive it to a university she now can’t afford to attend.
Maybe we could’ve found a way to work through that.
Through the fights, the way she’d dismiss how I felt about everything, telling me to man up and stop bothering her when she had shit to do.
But there was no working through the day I came home to Holt in our house, his arms around my wife, and Abby looking up at him with her lips parted and red, breathless, her lashes fluttering.
We hadn’t even drawn up the fucking divorce papers yet.
Still looking at stuff like legal separation, maybe a trial thing.
And she couldn’t even wait to move on.
With my own fucking brother.
That’s all I see now, every time I look at her.
That lost, dazed, starry-eyed way she was looking at Holt.
Used to be how she looked at me.
But I don’t quit.
If anything, we can stick it out a little while longer for our kid, and at least figure out how to do this separation without any collateral damage.
Even if everything went sour with me and Abby too quick...
One thing I know, whatever else she is, she loves Andrea just as much as I do.
So I’m loading up the car. I’m packing up all the camping supplies we shouldn’t have spent money on because we’re going to use them once and never again. It takes two to try, and we’re way past trying, not even for the love of our daughter.
I’m trying not to break something with how hard I’m slinging things into the back of the trunk.
And I’m bolting upright, nearly banging my head on the frame of the car. That’s when a high, tinny scream comes shrilling from inside the house.
Andrea.
I’d know the sound of my daughter in serious distress anywhere.
Before I can even blink, I’m rocketing into the house, slamming my way inside hard enough to make the front door bounce on its hinges. “Andrea? Andrea!”
She’s there. Standing in the open-plan living room and kitchen, next to the kitchen island.
Just staring.
Stone-still, trembling, little hand shaking in front of her face, staring at something I can’t see, her face white as a sheet.
Whatever it is, it’s on the floor, and my stomach sinks with dread as she lets out a shaky whisper. “M-mom...?”
I feel like I’m walking through a nightmare, crossing the room numbly.
I don’t want to see it.
What I fear is already there.
But it’s too late. I can’t avoid it.
I stare down at my wife’s dead, empty face, her skin already rigid, her eyes milky and pale and completely devoid of everything that once made her the woman I loved and hated.
* * *
Present
I snap back into my own skin with a sharp gasp, sucking in a breath that makes my entire body heave.
Shit.
It’s like waking up from a bad dream by being plunged into a frigid ocean, and I sit up sharply, ignoring the twinge in my leg.
Peace jerks back from me, stumbling, looking at me with wide eyes. “Blake?”
I stare at her.
It’s...
Right.
I’m not there, not then.
My pounding, frantic heart doesn’t quite seem to believe it, but I gotta remember.
That’s in the past. This is the present.
Pressing a hand over my chest, I suck in several shuddering breaths, telling myself to calm the fuck down.
“Sorry,” I manage. “Guess I fell half asleep or something. I just...fuck, I remembered some shit I didn’t want to.”
Her expression clears, soft with sympathy, understanding. “That’s normal when you start relaxing under treatment,” she soothes. “It can almost put you in a trance state. Releasing physical pain often opens up emotional scars. It helps a lot to just let it happen and work through it.”
“Don’t want to work through it,” I bite off.
I can’t take this.
This shitty feeling bottoming out my gut, this thing I never actually looked at before to recognize it for what it honestly is.
Guilt.
All these years I’ve been carrying a boulder of guilt for not saving my wife from a freak aneurysm I had no control over.
Like if I’d been a better man somehow, not only would our marriage not have fallen apart, but she wouldn’t have died.
Wouldn’t have left Andrea behind.
Crazy thoughts, I know.
No good reason it’s my fault.
I just know that dark knot of hurt inside me swears it is. I can’t take that shit right now when I’m still all tangled up with present-day guilt over being a mindless jerkwad animal to Peace, too.
Now, I’m doing it again.
Lashing out like a trapped beast who doesn’t trust the person trying to clean the blood from its flesh, biting the hand that ought to soothe it.
I don’t fucking know how to stop.
So the best thing is for her to get away from me, before I hurt her even more
and have to see that crestfallen expression on her face again.
Same expression that’s there right now, darkening her pretty eyes as she says, “Blake, you’ve got to stop fighting your fears.”
“Don’t need a therapist,” I throw back, sliding off the table, dropping myself down on my good leg when I don’t want to test the bad one right now.
As mad as I am, as fucked up in the head over this girl who tugs me every which way, it might just stress collapse on me.
“This session’s over. No more appointments. I’m grateful, lady, but don’t try this again. Just go home, Peace. There’s nothing you can do to help me.”
“No,” she says softly, but with a firmness that says she knows she’s right. “There’s nothing I can do to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.”
My jaw tightens.
I can’t.
So I just listen to her packing up her things, turning my back on her—
And freezing as I see Andrea standing in the door, the cold swirl of night at her back, looking at me with the closest I’ve ever seen to contempt on my daughter’s face.
“Wow,” she says. “And I thought Mom dying fucked me up.” Her voice bleeds with disappointment, with hurt, and shit if that doesn’t cut me deep, knowing my baby girl looks at me and sees someone she can’t believe in. “You can’t even be nice to someone who’s just trying to help you?”
“Andrea...”
“Don’t Andrea me.”
Don’t know when my daughter grew up.
But she sounds more adult than I’m capable of being right now as she cuts me off with her quiet, withering words. She sweeps me over with a look that says I’ve let her down.
Then, shaking her head, she holds her hand out to Peace.
“Come on. I’ll help you load your things in the car,” she says, and even if I’m hurting, I’m so proud of the softness in Andrea’s voice, the gentleness and sympathy she’s showing Peace.
I don’t even care that Andrea’s taking Peace’s side when she’s right.
“Thanks,” Peace says with a wistful smile, her head bowed.
And they leave me standing there in the middle of the living room, nearly naked in all but the heart I guard too well.
They walk out of the house and leave me alone to my bullshit.
* * *
This time, I can’t skimp on the apology.
After Andrea and Peace left, I sat down in my bedroom for a long time, just thinking. Getting myself together, trying to work through these messy feelings that still make no sense.
The autopsy report said Abby’s aneurysm was congenital.
She’d been born prone to high blood pressure and clotting, a lethal cocktail just asking for anything from varicose veins to deep vein thrombosis to clogged arteries to brain clots.
She hit the jackpot on the latter.
Wasn’t anything but shit luck in life and maybe her folks gifting her a few genetic time bombs.
It probably would’ve happened sooner or later.
I stare at my clenched fists, listening to the sounds of Andrea coming home and shutting herself in her room with a slamming door.
Why am I doing this?
Why do I feel like I gotta save everyone, even people who can’t be saved at all?
You ask a shrink, and they’d say I’m some kinda egomaniac. Savior complex. Gotta be everyone’s hero but my own.
I don’t think it’s that, though.
I’m scared of losing more folks, so I feel like if I just try hard enough, then I won’t anymore. Even though it doesn’t work that way.
I still remember folks I fought with in Afghanistan. The people who died when that bomb went off and shredded my leg—people who were like my brothers and sisters.
Jenna Ford, too.
Warren’s sister.
We grew up together, her always with War, inseparable twins. Everyone loved the shit out of Jenna like she was their sister, daughter, or the love of their life.
And I lost her because she saw the wrong things and a monster arranged an 'accident' to shut her up.
Lost my old man, too. Dead of a heart attack.
Lost Abby, slipping through my fingers when she was just feet away from me, going cold on the floor, me having no damn clue.
And then Ma.
Dying with Holt, and me not even there to see her go.
I get what Peace meant about not seeing her dad die so it’s like his body wasn’t real. He didn’t really die.
That’s how it is with Ma.
For all the weird conflicted feels I got with her, the love and hate and fear and frustration and resentment, there’s still this weird void that can’t think of her as dead.
I gotta let go.
But first I have to go apologize to Peace.
She was right. Brutally so.
And I gotta stop carrying around this poison, using it as a club to drive people away.
* * *
When I head on up to the Charming Inn, though, Peace’s cabin is dark, and her little purple bug of a rental car is nowhere to be found.
Aw, hell.
Heart’s Edge ain’t exactly a jumping hot spot, so there can’t be many places to find her.
Reluctantly, though, I go to the main house. I know there’ll be questions. I know I’m gonna get grilled, when I feel like I’m the last eligible single man in Heart’s Edge and everybody just stares whenever a girl comes anywhere near me.
Especially my friends.
Haley’s a new transplant to Heart’s Edge herself, ending up here after her car crapped out and she tumbled into Warren’s lap.
She’s become my friend, too, on top of being the wife of one of my lifelong buddies.
And she only has to take one good look at my face to know something ain’t right.
I’m standing there in her living room, trying to figure out how to ask if she knows where that flower child has gotten off to, without being obvious.
Haley clucks her tongue in sympathy.
“That’s one long face,” she says, propping her laundry basket on her hip, a gurgling little boy inside it and reaching up to tug at her hair. “Funny thing is, I’ve been seeing a lot of that expression around here lately.”
I wince.
If it’s Peace she means, I know damn well it’s my fault.
Taking a breath, I scrub my gloved palms against my jeans like that can soak the sweat into my gloves, and ask, “You uh...you seen her around?”
I don’t even have to name her.
Hay just smiles sadly. “She left with Ember about an hour ago. I think they’re at The Nest; she had a guitar with her.”
A guitar?
Okay.
I feel a little creepy following her to Felicity’s coffee shop, but I’ll keep it simple.
Get in, say I’m sorry, and bug out.
Maybe it’ll be easier in public, where she doesn’t have to worry I’m gonna say something mean again and hurt her feelings when we’re alone.
Goddamn, I really am an asshole.
I don’t know when I got like this. Just know this isn’t who I want to be.
It’s not who I was when I was married to Abby.
It’s not the example I want to set for Andrea.
And it’s not how I want to treat Peace, when she deserves so much better.
I offer Haley a faint smile and flick her a quick salute.
“Thanks,” I tell her. “Guess I’m suddenly in need of a little caffeine.”
I turn away, but a soft “Hey,” drifts toward my back.
I glance over my shoulder, raising a brow, but Haley just smiles.
“Good luck, Blake,” she says.
I’m gonna need it.
I give her a lopsided grin and go.
* * *
It’s already late, and The Nest is closing soon, but I’ve got time to catch Peace.
When I get to the café, though, I almost think it’s shut down already. The lights inside are dim,
just barely shining in a golden haze through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows.
But no, it’s not closed, there are cars parked outside and people in there, seated in intimate little clusters.
So why is it so dark?
I get my answer when I step inside. The lights have been dimmed to shine a spotlight on the far end of the café.
Peace and Ember sit on stools. Peace with a weathered, honey-toned guitar shining with the love of many hands, and Ember with her violin propped up on her shoulder.
And Peace starts singing so quietly, with all her heart in it, her voice winding in pure sweetness around the twanging notes from the instruments.
The entire room’s silent, watching raptly.
Hell, so am I.
Completely spellbound.
I hardly see Ember, Doc’s wife.
I’ve only got eyes for Peace, the way she sings like she’s mourning and exulting, a whisper for the dead and a prayer for the living.
That’s all I can hear, listening to her.
All that raw emotion overflowing till the words don’t even matter.
She’s singing her whole heart out, pain written on her expressive, lovely face in lines of sweetness.
And it’s the most beautiful shit I’ve ever heard.
I shouldn’t be here, eavesdropping on this.
Feels like I’m too dirty for something this sanctified, this beautiful, and maybe I’ll ruin it if I stay.
I’m too broken for her.
Too much of a mess.
She can keep working at me with her hands all she wants, but she’ll never shape me back into anything whole. That’s not her responsibility.
It’s not anybody’s but my own, and I can’t bring myself to ask her to wait for me to fucking try.
I gotta leave.
Only, I’m rooted to the spot, captivated by her, and I can’t bring myself to walk away just yet.
I’m too conspicuous, though. Without ever taking my gaze off her, I drift over to the long coffee bar, letting the curve of it take me out of their direct line of sight.
