Everything You Are(78)

Chapter Thirty

ALLIE

It’s nearly nine o’clock before Allie’s eyes flicker open, and she withdraws her hand from Braden’s grasp.

Phee has called, twice, to check on her and see if Braden needs a ride home. The doctor has made rounds, assuring him that they’ll keep her today for observation but that she’s fine, really. No permanent damage. Also to warn him that a crisis worker will be stopping in to make sure there is a plan going forward.

“Have a good sleep?” Braden asks as his daughter’s eyes focus in on him. She answers him with a question of her own.

“Why?”

This isn’t going to be one of the innocent questions of her childhood. No “why is the sky blue?” or even the dreaded why of the birds and the bees. He braces himself to give her the truth about whatever she asks, keeping his tone as light as he can. “Why what? You’ll need to be a little more specific.”

“Why didn’t you come and meet me that day? Where were you?”

That day. The day her mother and her brother were extinguished from her world.

It’s an effort to breathe past the obstruction in his throat, the tightness in his chest that could be grief or the beginnings of a panic attack or an ill-timed heart attack. He can’t lie to her. Not here. Not now.

“I was drunk.” He wants to soften the harsh truth, to shield both of them, but he bites back the excuses.

“Too drunk to remember?”

Braden pokes at his memory of that day, taking his time. Sorting through the feelings, the thoughts and decisions. Allie makes a small sound like a wounded creature and rolls away from him.

“I didn’t forget, Allie. It was the only thing on my mind for days. I’d stopped drinking the day you messaged me on Facebook. Had stayed sober for months. You, coming back into my life, was the first thing worth getting sober for in years. You have to believe that.”

“Then why?”

All the pain of the weeping world in her voice. He wants to beat himself to a bloody pulp for having added to her suffering. But his penance is the slower and more exquisitely agonizing act of feeling her pain, and his own, and speaking truth when lies would be easier for both of them.

“I was afraid . . .”

And there it is, the panic. Waiting in ambush.

His vision darkens at the edges. His heartbeat thrums through his body, too fast, too loud. He’s suffocating, can’t get control of his breathing.

“Dad! Dad! Are you okay?”

He manages to nod, to get a good breath in, to gasp: “Panic attack. It’ll pass.”

Little by little, the flood of adrenaline fades, leaving him limp and exhausted. “I had a bad attack that morning,” he says.

She doesn’t voice the why this time, but he feels it, hears it in the tension of her body, in the way she breathes.

“I woke up excited. Finally, I was going to get to see you. And then the panic hit, and the next clear thought I had was three days later when Alexandra called to tell me—well, to tell me.”

“I was scared, too,” Allie says. “But I showed up, anyway.”

“I’ve got no excuse. It was just . . . all of the lost years swamped me. The fear that you would be a stranger to me. The idea of being awkward with you, of not knowing what to say, of seeing judgment in your eyes and knowing how deeply I’d failed you.”

“Why panic today, though? Why now? Is it still me?”

“Well, I am terrified by the thought of losing you, that you tried to kill yourself. But the panic . . .” Dark wings flutter at the edges of his vision. He takes a breath. “Something happened at the cabin, when I hurt my hands. Phee showing up and talking about that ridiculous curse, trying to make me remember, that’s making the panic worse.”

Both of them are quiet for a long moment.

“I was going to take you to my audition,” Allie says in a small voice. “For the University of Washington School of Music.”

Pride and shame and a sense of wonder fill his heart to overflowing.

“I’ll never forgive myself for missing it. What did you play?”

“I was supposed to play the C Minor.”

“That’s incredibly impressive. Steph said you were brilliant, but I thought she might be a tiny bit biased.”

“Steph is over the top about everything.” She smiles as she says it, but then her eyes narrow. “When did you talk to Steph?”

“She was worried about you. Came over to the house a while back to check on you and threatened me with pepper spray.”

Allie actually laughs at that, the most beautiful sound Braden thinks he’s ever heard, but it ends far too quickly.

“I should let her know what happened.” Silence for a moment, and then: “C Minor is the piece you were working on. Before. The last one I remembered.”

“Oh, Allie.” He lets this all sink in. “You said you were going to play the C Minor. What happened?”

“I played the lullaby,” she says very softly. “The one you used to play for me. Do you remember?”

“Whatever possessed you to play that?”

“Because it was yours,” she says simply, as if this is the sort of obvious thing he should have known. Grass is green, the sun provides light, and his daughter played a song at an audition that he wrote for her when she was a baby. Something classical would surely have been expected, and yet she had played something new, a song that linked her to her father.