Everything You Are(27)

Unless you have hit the absolute end of your rope and have no other options. If helping Allie means calling Jo, then that’s what he’s going to have to do. He stares at the pot of congealing oatmeal on the stove. At the untouched bowl abandoned on the counter.

Braden picks up the house phone. Despite the intervening years, his fingers dial automatically, the number practically part of his DNA. Maybe she won’t answer, it’s early yet. He’ll leave a message. Or he won’t. Even if she answers, he can just—

And then her voice is on the line, clear and vigorous and thoroughly Jo. “Hello? Hello? Listen, Lilian, I don’t know what game—”

“Jo. Hey.” He closes his eyes, resisting the urge to smack himself in the head with the receiver. Of course Jo has caller ID. Of course that’s what she’d think.

“Braden?”

He grips the receiver a little tighter, plastic digging into bone. Waits.

“What the hell are you doing? If you’ve moved back in with that woman—”

“Jo.”

“Six fucking years, Braden. What the hell?”

“She’s dead, Jo. Lilian’s dead, and so is Trey.”

Nice work, he mocks himself. Way to break the news gently.

He hears the little gasp on the other end of the line, the silence that says more than words.

“Braden? Are you there?”

His blood surges loud in his ears; music plays in his head like a movie soundtrack that refuses to be put on mute.

“Here.”

“And Allie?”

“Alive. Unhurt. But she’s . . .” He doesn’t know how to explain Allie.

“I can come, if it would help.”

“I don’t think . . . it’s not like she knows you. Although anybody is probably better than me.”

“Nonsense. You’re her father.”

Laughter is bitter in his mouth. “She hates me. She won’t talk to me, won’t look at me. She explained, very clearly, that I am here as a figurehead adult until her eighteenth birthday, and then I’m out of the picture.”

Jo is so much better at being a human being than he is. She skips the recriminations, the questions, and gets straight to the point.

“She’s an angry, grieving teenager and you’re the perfect target. That’s expected.”

“I don’t know if she’s sleeping, or eating. I don’t know anything. A counselor, maybe?”

“Give her some time.”

“I don’t have much of that.”

“How long do you have?”

He does the math. Allie has an August birthday. Six months. He has half a year to repair a breach that took eleven years to create.

“Just be there,” Jo says. “Don’t let her push you away. My God, Braden, what happened?”

“There was an accident. Lilian was taking Trey to a doctor’s appointment, is what I understand. Police are still investigating, but she might have fallen asleep at the wheel.”

“God.”

“I was supposed to meet Allie that day, but I . . . didn’t. Now she won’t let me near her. Has completely cut me off.”

“Well, that sounds familiar, anyway. She always was like you, I thought.”

This is as close as Jo is going to get to laying on the guilt about the way he’s cut himself off from his own family. “It’s not the same,” he wants to tell her. “It’s not the same at all.”

A silence falls between them, full of years of important things that have never been said.

“How’s Dad?” he finally asks, because it’s the one question he can handle.

“Declining. I’ve moved him in with me.” Jo lets him shift the subject without pushing the issue. For all of her forthrightness, she has always had an incredible awareness of her brother’s more sensitive nature, has sheltered him from their father, who does not.

“Come home, Braden,” she says. “Bring her here. It’s beautiful in the spring.”

He closes his eyes, remembering. Spring in Colville is a slow emergence of leaves and flowers that spans a month or more. The quality of the light, the freshness of the air. It’s winter there yet, but in another month . . .

“I can’t.” His words are strangled in his throat, so quiet he wonders if she can even hear him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says. “Nobody blames you.”

“I blame me.”

“Well, then.” She sighs. “When you think you’ve punished yourself enough for what you haven’t done, come home. And bring your daughter. She needs her family.”

Mitch’s dead face stares up at him, eyes blank and open. “Dare you,” the blue lips say.

Dare me to what? Go home? Remember?

Mitch doesn’t answer.

“Listen, Jo, I have to go—”

“Don’t you vanish on me again, Braden, you hear? Call me.”

He ends the call so she won’t hear him falling apart as memory flashes come at him like a strobe light.

Mitch’s dead face. Snow. Darkness.

A blast of pain as his fist connects with Mitch’s jaw . . .

That staggers him.

In all of his known life, Braden has never engaged in a fistfight. His hands were too important to risk the injury. Besides, he’s always hated violence. This can’t be right, must be a product of a nightmare, not a memory. He feels himself poised on the edge of a dark chasm, about to free fall.