All There Is (Juniper Hills Book 1)

by Violet Duke

  He’d figured it was just because she was busy with the bakery in the mornings, but clearly there was something more. “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “I started doing the cookie thing years ago. And in the beginning, when I’d go to drop off the box, with all the kids at the center, every once in a while, I’d see a boy there who I would swear on my own life was Peyton. Or an older boy, who looked just how I imagined Peyton would look at that age.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, shaking her head when he offered her his jacket. “I’m not cold.” Even as she said it a shiver quaked across her frame.

  Jake didn’t push. He knew all too well what that was like, enduring the bad side effects that came with the memories. On his part, it would feel a bit like penance at times. A toll fee at others. He’d found over the years that the memories never came without some price.

  When her body finally stopped trembling, she continued. “I wouldn’t see Peyton all the time. But when I did, it would take every bit of restraint I had to convince myself the mirage wasn’t real. That it wouldn’t be okay for me to run up to that random kid and hug him like he was my dead brother brought back to life.”

  “Emma—”

  She shook her head again. Right. No comfort. The price to pay.

  “But that’s not even the worst part,” she whispered. “Do you want to know what is?”

  He was certain it would be worse than he could ever have imagined. But he asked anyway, for her. “What was the worst part?”

  “That in the moment when I’d first see Peyton again, for the briefest of seconds, I’d be so happy, so relieved that he made it out of that fire alive.”

  He frowned. “Of course you would. Sweetheart, anyone would.”

  She simply shook her head. Over and over again. “Don’t you see? If Peyton had survived, then that means Megan would be the one lying in the grave right now.”

  That blow coldcocked him out of nowhere. Jesus Christ. Is this what she’s been carrying around for all these years?

  Her voice cracked and withered. “So it’s not okay for me to feel that way.” The tears broke free, and shame filled her features. “That’s why I stopped letting myself. I trained myself not to feel. If ever I’d see Peyton’s little face among those kids, I’d make myself not be happy. Not be relieved. Not even for a second.” She stared at the ground, shoulders sagging from the weight of that, a weight she should never have had to bear. “After a while, it just got too hard, so I stopped going to the center. And that’s when I asked Gloria to start picking up the cookies.”

  “Emma.” He speared his hands through her hair and gently tilted her face up to his. “Honey, I know it seems like that’s the way you should feel, but it’s not. It’s okay to want your brother to have survived that fire. That doesn’t mean you think, for even a second, that the opposite scenario between your siblings is even remotely okay.”

  He could see she didn’t believe him. He wondered if she could even hear him right now. She looked as if she were drowning in her grief right before his eyes.

  “Have you talked to Megan about this?”

  That jolted her back to awareness. She tore herself out of his grasp. “Of course not. How can I possibly tell her any of this? I’m all she has, Jake. At least Peyton had his mom. So Megan needs me not to feel that way for even a second. Because Peyton had his mom wishing, out loud, that it had been Megan and not Peyton who’d died in that fire.”

  A horrified sound broke out of his chest. “What?”

  Emma blinked, startled over the vehemence in his growl. She took a step back. He followed.

  “Emma, did your stepmom do that? Say that to you? Or to Megan?”

  A mask fell over her face. And she retreated behind a wall he couldn’t breach.

  “Emma, tell me. Did she? Did you hear your stepmom say that?”

  “Yes.” Eyes dull with pain met his. “She used to tell me that it was all my fault, that I killed her son. And she used to say it should’ve been Megan and not Peyton. She never told Megan that, but she told me. Over and over.”

  “She was wrong.” He could barely keep the rage out of his voice. His dad may have sent him to juvie, but he never did anything like this. What Emma’s stepmother had done, even if it had been done out of sadness and anguish, was cruel. Abusive. “She should never have said that to you, Emma. That woman had no right to say those things to you.”

  “She said them about you, too,” she whispered. “Over. And over.”

  Jake backed up a step, forgetting for maybe the first time in his life the path he’d chosen, the burden he’d taken on when he’d falsified that confession. “Maybe I deserve her saying that about me. But not you. Never you. You did nothing wrong, Emma. And Megan’s life should never have been talked about so callously. I don’t care how much that woman was grieving. No one’s life is expendable for another’s.”

  The uncanny parallels between their situations wasn’t lost on him. That this was a thousand times worse than anything he’d been made to endure slayed him.

  “I didn’t tell you all this so you’d feel sorry for me, Jake. Or so you’d try to fix me.” She took in a deep breath. Then another. Soon the color returned to her face, as did the life to her eyes. But along with it came new, stronger, hundred-foot-tall walls between them.

  “I told you all this so you would understand why I need to keep to our Jake and Emma 2.0 arrangement. Why I can’t let the past seep into my present.” Her voice hitched, but she finished firm. “Not even for the briefest second.”

  That single resolute statement shifted the ground under him. Almost sent him to his knees. Yes, he did understand now.

  “You promised me we could go back to our arrangement after I talked,” she whispered softly. “Did you mean that? Can we go back to being the two strangers who don’t have all this behind us?”

  She spared him the pain of asking him outright if he could keep his promise this time.

  Unlike that night.

  “Of course, Emma. We’re right back where we were before you told me all that.”

  She looked at him as if measuring his level of honesty, her level of trust. “Good,” she said after a few long beats. “Then we should probably get started with our day.”

  Just like that.

  When they both stepped forward to head toward the bakery, Emma halted and made a quick snapping motion as if she’d just remembered something. “You know what? Paul mentioned he’s ready for you to start ordering supplies for the library.” Casual and breezy. She was pulling it off well. “Since you worked all night on the floors, why don’t you take the morning off and head over to the library? I’m not going to be here anyway.”

  It was a flimsy way to put some space between them and they both knew it, but this was the first time the fire had come up since he’d started working here. There was no manual for this sort of thing. He wanted to give her time. Space.

  Didn’t mean he couldn’t hate it.

  He studied her distant expression, willed her to look up at him.

  She wouldn’t.

  “You sure you don’t want me in the bakery this morning?”

  He’d chosen his words carefully. Want, not need. He didn’t want her to just need him there; he needed her to want him there, too.

  “I’m sure. Go make brilliant plans and order fabulous things at the library. I’ll see you after lunch.” Her new smile, though dim and fading, was at least genuine.

  “Okay,” he said softly, squeezing her shoulder one more time. “I’ll check in at the library and then be back in a few hours.”

  They split off to head in different directions.

  In more ways than one.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emma glanced at the clock again. Then checked her phone. Again.

  He’d been gone almost six hours now.

  The incident earlier had been bad, yes, but she hadn’t expected Jake to plumb not return. Even the mere thought that he was purposefully staying away was a bl
ow to the gut. They were supposed to be able to bounce back to being Jake and Emma 2.0.

  He promised.

  Unable to stop herself, she quickly locked up and jogged over to the library with a Ziploc bag of cookies for Megan as her lame excuse, even though she knew Megan wouldn’t be at the construction site since she was at a book fair talking to some local authors.

  “Hey, Emma,” called out one of the construction guys, whose kid brother, Timmy, loved coming in with his friends to window-shop and taste samples. Unlike his friends, though, Nick’s little brother would gather up his coins to buy a cupcake every so often. When his friends weren’t with him. She suspected there was a girl Timmy was sweet on, and he didn’t want his third-grade classmates to tease him.

  Nick hopped off the bed of a pickup truck as it backed into a stall in front of the library. A few other guys from Paul’s crew jumped out, as well, and waved.

  “Hey, Nick.” She gave him an affectionate hug and ruffled his hair. “Jeez, when are you going to stop growing? I swear you’re at least another foot taller than you were in high school.”

  “Don’t remind me. I was also like forty pounds heavier.” He flexed an arm and patted his abs proudly. “Working on Paul’s crew for the past two years, I’m in better shape now than when I was playing football.”

  While his three buddies began ribbing him about still being the runt of their crew, Emma peered through the windows of the library, trying to see if she could spot Jake. “Hey, do you know if Jake is still around? He was supposed to come back to the bakery a while ago. I know he and Paul were going to work on a supplies list, though, so I wasn’t sure if he was here or over at the lumberyard or something.”

  Nick shrugged. “Don’t know. I actually just got here myself. Me and a few of the other guys have been out prepping another job site. Want me to find him for you?” He pulled open the door to the library and paused to scan the area alongside her.

  Emma noticed then how the banging and buzzing and chatter came to a slow halt.

  Nick did, too. After exchanging a few silent looks with the guys on-site, he turned to try to usher Emma back out the door. “You know what? Why don’t you wait outside where it’s less crazy, and I’ll track him down for you.”

  “What’s going on, Nick?” She watched him pale a bit as one of the guys whispered something to him she couldn’t hear. “Tell me. I won’t leave until you do.”

  He exhaled heavily. “Okay, but I don’t know all the details yet, so don’t freak out. An ambulance came for Jake a little while ago.”

  Dread filled her veins with ice. “Wait, Jake got injured?” The room began spinning and shrinking all around her as panic clawed at her from the inside out. “What happened?” She very nearly decked the poor guy when he didn’t answer quickly enough.

  Steve, one of the old-timers on Paul’s crew, stepped forward. “We’d been putting up a new structural support beam when one of the guys tore something pretty bad in his leg. He went down, and then it went like dominoes. The guy next to him got tipped over with the ladder, and that took out the guy holding up the center. It all went to shit from there. We lost control of the beam and the remaining guys couldn’t stop it from crashing down onto Jake, who’d been off to the side helping us guide it up into the ceiling.”

  “That ceiling beam?” The exposed center wooden beam he was pointing at was at least three times thicker than the other ceiling joists around it and well over twenty feet long, spanning the entire length of the room.

  She remembered when something about half that size was installed in her bakery, the guys had mentioned it weighing more than four hundred pounds. Blocking her mind’s eye from visualizing that giant beam falling on Jake, she armed herself with questions. “Was he wearing a hard hat? What did the paramedics say? Where the heck is Paul?”

  Steve was quick to reassure her. “He had on a hard hat the entire time he was here, Emma. But that beam took eight of us guys to carry it. When it fell on Jake, even with the hard hat and half of us still bearing some of the weight, it knocked him out cold. That was about two hours ago, and last we heard, he still hasn’t woken up.”

  Oh God. “Which hospital is he in? Connelly Memorial?”

  “Yeah. Paul’s over there now if you want to call and get an update. You look shaken up. Why don’t you let one of us drive you there—”

  She was already out the door.

  Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.

  Emma wasn’t sure if she pressed on the brakes once in the entire twenty-minute drive to the hospital. She definitely had no clue which lot she’d parked her car in. And it was possible that her ears were ringing right now because she’d been shouting so loudly at the folks manning the ER after they’d informed her that Jake was being transported between floors so his room information wasn’t updated.

  It wasn’t until Paul finally found her and brought her to Jake’s bedside that she felt her lungs fill with air again, her brain registering coherent thought.

  “There’s blood,” she gasped, seeing Jake’s unconscious form lying there with patches of dry blood marring his neck and parts of the hospital gown he’d been dressed in. “Why is there blood? Steve said Jake had a hard hat on.”

  She had no idea why she was fixating on that. She knew the hard hat wasn’t some magical force field, but for some reason, she was clinging to the hope that in this situation, for this man, it was.

  Paul squeezed her shoulder and tried to get her to sit down. “He did. But the corner of the beam nicked his ear and scraped up the side of his face some. All minor. They just haven’t had a chance to clean him up yet because they were running MRIs and some other brain scans.”

  Brain scans.

  She felt her stomach drop to her feet and her heart crack wide-open in undiluted panic. “Were the test results okay? What did the doctors say?” She stared at Jake’s rugged face, seeing now the bruise forming along his jawline and the small bandage covering the tip of his right ear.

  “It’s a concussion for sure, but no skull fracture, and no brain bleeding or swelling. They also scanned his neck and spine and said they didn’t find any damage.”

  “But they can’t wake him up?”

  “No. They say his brain needs time to recover from the trauma. Some folks wake up in a few hours, others in a few days. We just have to let him rest and heal. But the doctors are pretty confident that he’ll be just fine.”

  Emma was having a hard time hearing anything beyond the scariest parts of that explanation. Trauma. Days to wake up.

  What if he doesn’t wake up at all?

  She finally took Paul’s offer to sit. Or rather, she pretty much fell back into the chair he’d slid under her. She scooted the seat as close to Jake’s bed as possible and closed her hand over his. “You better hope you’re in that first category and not the second,” she whispered fiercely, even as she found herself begging the universe to be merciful rather than raging at it as she had for so many years after the fire. Prayer, confession, whatever it takes, she silently promised whatever higher power was listening in.

  All the while she kept her voice strong and steady for Jake’s ears. “If you stay asleep for a few days, I’ll kick your butt when you wake up, banged up noggin or not.” When he didn’t crack open those beautiful sage-green eyes of his and smile at her only partly real threat, she put her head down against his shoulder lightly and closed her eyes.

  Not really sure she’d be good at the praying thing, she tried confession instead.

  I can’t lose him again.

  Over the next few hours, she heard nurses and some of the guys on Paul’s crew filing in and out of the room. She even heard Megan calling her name. But Emma couldn’t bring herself to lift her eyelids. The warmth of his body under the blanket and the slow rise and fall of his chest were the only two things her brain wanted to process. Nothing else around her mattered.

  She eventually fell asleep that way, refusing to let go of his hand regardless of how
many people tried to pull her away from him.

  Emma remembered what it was like, how scared and confused she’d been waking up alone in the hospital after the fire. Nothing around her made sense; the only thing she had with her in that cold, empty room to ground her were her jumbled memories of what had happened before she lost consciousness.

  The more awake she got, the faster the flashes of chaotic images from the fire came. And with them came longer stretches of nothingness where memories should have been.

  She remembered how those void-filled pockets in her brain had been even scarier than the horrifying images.

  Her own voice had been the only thing that sounded remotely familiar. And even that voice had been jagged and out of sorts when she’d called out to the nurses she could see through the glass-paneled walls of her room.

  She had always thought it was so strange when movie characters in hospital scenes would wake up and call out, “Hello?” As if they were strangers knocking on an open door and announcing their presence. Or aliens arriving on a new planet.

  But that night in that hospital bed, with nothing and no one around her that she recognized, she’d been unable to come up with a better first word to utter, either.

  She didn’t care how long he took to come to; she wasn’t leaving his side. She was going to be there when Jake finally woke up and felt that strange urge to call out, “Hello?”

  So she could say hi back.

  Jake woke up feeling like a wrecking ball had smashed into his head.

  But judging by the sight of Emma fast asleep in a chair beside his hospital bed, her head lying across his stomach, one hand clutching her talisman-like pendants, one hand holding his, he’d say the wrecking ball had been worth it.

  Even though the sluggish feelings in his body told him he was on some kind of pain meds, his head still hurt like crazy. Must be a concussion.

  It wasn’t his first, so he knew to run through his memories to see if there were any holes. Thankfully there weren’t. As soon as he determined that, he quit thinking about the past and focused on the present with Emma here almost in his arms.