Everything You Are(8)

It turns out her heart isn’t completely frozen after all. Emotions surge through her, threaten to swamp her. Anger. Loss. Love. All in equal measure. She blocks his path, and he comes to a halt about a foot in front of her. The people behind him stop, confused, and then create an alternate course, flowing around the two of them as if they are an island in the middle of a river.

“So you are still alive,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

She’s not sure if he means he’s sorry he’s still alive, or what all he’s sorry for. His eyes look anguished. His hands tremble visibly. It’s this, the weakness on his part, that sets flame to her anger.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Aunt Alexandra pivots away from an embrace with a weeping woman and puts a restraining hand on Allie’s arm.

“Language,” she whispers. Don’t make a scene, her expression says. Allie’s own hands are clenched into fists. Maybe she’ll hit him, beat her fury out on his chest. Scream at the top of her lungs.

Her aunt steps between them, giving her father a stiff-armed hug. “Braden. I’m so glad you were able to make it.” Allie can hear the insincerity like a badly tuned instrument.

Her father’s gaze doesn’t break from Allie’s. They might as well be alone rather than in the middle of a crowd, both of them oblivious to Alexandra, to the press of other bodies.

“I didn’t know,” he says. “Until Thursday.”

It’s a lame excuse, and only answers part of her question.

Where have you been all of my fucking life? Why didn’t you meet me like you said you would? Where were you when I got the call about the accident, when I watched my brother die? That’s what she really wants to know.

She feels the tears encroaching, and with them helplessness and abandonment and futility. She squeezes her hands into tighter fists, clenches her teeth, focuses all of her willpower on holding them back, but they get past her, anyway.

Damn it. Damn you.

Aunt Alex clamps a hand around her wrist and tugs. “Come, dear. We must go to the graveside. They are waiting.”

Allie doesn’t budge. “Dad comes, too.”

“Allie—”

“We need to talk, and he has a way of vanishing.”

“He can meet us at the cemetery. The car is waiting.”

Allie feels her spine stiffen, and she turns on her aunt. “I’m not going without him. He can ride with us.”

People are staring, whispering.

“Is that the father?”

“Pretty sure. He’s been gone so long . . .”

“Ran off and left poor Lilian with two kids to raise . . .”

Allie doesn’t care, but her aunt shoots a venomous glare at her father, then yanks harder on her arm.

“Come. Now.”

Allie’s hand clenches around her father’s. “You are coming, too.”

His body is as taut as hers. She can feel it in his hand. For a moment, she thinks he’ll refuse, that she’ll be towed away and lose him again forever, but as she begins to move and the tension increases on their linked hands, he takes a step to follow her, and then another, all the way out to the car.

A moment of hesitation at the open door, where it all hangs in the balance. He sucks in a huge breath and slides into the seat beside her. Round one. She still has a battle to fight, because as much as she hates her father at this moment, she is not going to Canada with Aunt Alexandra, and he is the only one who can save her from that.





Chapter Five

BRADEN

Braden is in desperate need of a drink.

The church was bad, worse than he’d anticipated. There had been a photographic memorial to endure, for one thing. Lilian, still beautiful but aged by life and responsibility. Trey, young and vibrant and golden. In every picture, he was surrounded by friends, always laughing, eyes looking directly out at Braden.

Where were you? Why did you miss this?

Impossible to imagine that face, that energy, confined to a casket. As for Lilian . . .

God. He and Lilian were married in that church. Every time he closed his eyes to blot out the stark reality of those two coffins, he saw her in her wedding dress with pearls starring her dark hair and her sweet lips murmuring “I do,” in response to the minister’s question. She’d looked like a goddess to him, so far above him he’d nearly knelt before her, worshipping her more than the God who presided over the union.

Well, he’s been punished for that, and now he’s being punished again.

Which is only fair. Of course he can’t expect to just walk back into Allie’s life as if he never left her. He deserves all of the rage his daughter can aim in his direction. The only thing that matters is whether or not he can be of any help or comfort to her.

For all she’d said she wants to talk to him, she utters not a word all the way to the cemetery, keeping her face turned toward the window. Alexandra, on the other hand, holds nothing back.

“You have plenty of nerve showing up here today, Braden Healey. All of these years you’ve left Lilian alone to do everything. Raise two kids on her own, work, manage the house. And now here you are, waltzing into the funeral as if you own the church. You have absolutely no right to be here. No right to grieve.”

The venom finds its mark, dropping him into a flashback as dramatically as if he’s just stepped into a sinkhole.