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Since I had no intention of spending much time with her, I changed the subject. “I’m sorry for your loss. Your father was an honorable man.” I ignored the ache in my chest regarding his final confession.
“That’s what they’re all saying,” she said bemusedly.
“You say that like you didn’t know him.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She didn’t expand on it more. “How did you know my father?”
“We were…” How did I explain what Douglass was to me? A father figure. Mentor. And, in the past few years, one of my closest, and only, friends. “Business partners.”
“I see…” she stared off across the garden and towards the woods at the edge of her property. “I didn’t even know he was sick until just before he passed.”
“I’m sure it was… Difficult. For him to tell you. Fathers want to protect their daughters.” That had been Douglass’ excuse, anyhow. Though I’d disagreed with him on the subject, I couldn’t tell him how to live his life.
“Maybe the best way to protect me was to confide in me. Honestly, it’s not a—” she cut off abruptly, leaving me to wonder what she really thought of her father. I’d seen things from his point of view, but knew he kept his children in the dark about the dangerous world he lived in. “You disappeared before I could thank you.”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about the funeral. “Your sister’s grief was palpable. It’s understandable.”
Red flushed the edges of her eyes, tears pooling in them. Big blue eyes blinking, trying to keep them at bay. Her sister may express her pain more outwardly, but Summer felt it just as much. If not more.
She turned away, hiding it, and I felt the sudden urge to grab her shoulders and shake her. To force her to show me the ugliness and despair. To force her to be real. To feel her feelings in front of me. Because I was blocking off my own and I needed something real and colorful to make me feel alive again. I’d seen a brief flash of it as she crushed petals in her fingers, and I loved the force of her ferocity.
“I’m sorry,” she wiped at her cheeks, “I didn’t mean…”
“You didn’t mean to be sad?”
“What?” She blinked up at me, those beautiful blue eyes filled with such beautiful pain. It was tucked in deep, hidden from the world.
“You didn’t mean to cry in front of me? Didn’t mean to be grief stricken at your own father’s wake?” I reached down, cupping her face to force her to look up at me. I wiped at a tear with my thumb. “Don’t hide your feelings. Not from me. Your pain is beautiful because it means you loved hard.”
“I—I’m—” she sputtered, her confusion making her look that much more innocent. She had this look on her face, and it reminded me of the look she would give me when she was so little—it was a look of trust and adoration. Suddenly, I was pulled back into a world where I would do anything to make her happy.. Make her a bottle, wrap her in her favorite blanket, hold her for hours. We were suspended in time, feeling the emotion of our old bond pulsing between us.
And yet, it must have been my imagination, because, apparently, she didn’t even know who I was.
She suddenly stepped back, out of my touch, her expression blanketing over, closing off her feelings from me, and the connection snapped. “I’m not hiding anything.”
A stark and uncomfortable silence fell between us. She turned away, signaling for me to leave, but I wasn't done with her yet.
I held out my hand, and she stared at it blankly. I nodded towards hers. “Your heels.”
Blinking in surprise, she passed them over, and I held them as I followed her deep into the darkness of the garden. “You’ve abandoned your wake.”
“No one seems to care,” she said bitterly. “And my sister was exhausted. So I took her to her room.”
So, she’d overheard the same things I had at the wake—the sharks of Greybone Island, who didn’t care for your feelings but only their own interests. It reminded me of my purpose.
“A good reason to move on quickly, then.”
“What do you mean?” She bent over to smell one of the few remaining flowers and I forced myself not to stare at her ass but instead to focus on the way her eyes were closed. The momentary peaceful look on her face.
I had the insane urge to destroy it. “You said no one seemed to care that you weren’t at your own father’s wake. There seems to be no reason to stay here.”
“I have a lot of reasons to stay.”
“Of course. I’m sure there are things you have to do to close out the estate. But, as soon as that’s done, you can move back to—“ I caught myself about to admit that I knew where she was living. “Where you were living before.”
“At a prep school?” She chuckled incredulously. “Who says I want to go back there?”
“You would be stupid not to.”
