Amir, who had never wanted to leave Horseshoe Cliff! “Well?” I prodded.
His grin was bound by invisible thread to my heart. “It was wonderful. The history, the stories... everywhere I traveled, I thought of you.”
After a moment, I pulled my eyes from his. “I’ve been teaching, too.” I told him about the children with whom I worked.“Many of them come from families that are struggling. We give the kids food, a safe place to spend their after-school hours, academic tutoring, art classes, the consistency of a familiar face.”
“You’re their Rei.”
I leaned my head on Amir’s shoulder. No one had ever known me as deeply as he had known me. “I suppose so. Yes.” I remembered Will and shifted away again. “Do you think I should go up to Horseshoe Cliff? Maybe if we give Bear the money that Rei left him and we tell him the truth—that neither of us had anything to do with Rei’s death—he’ll finally leave me alone.”
Amir’s expression darkened. “You don’t need to worry about Bear.”
“What do you mean? Have you been up there?”
He looked out toward the horizon. “The farm school was a good place for me, but it was never my true home. Horseshoe Cliff is my home. I finally went back last week. Bear is a drunk. He always was, but it’s worse now. You would hardly recognize him. The cottage is ruined. He’s living in a trailer near the road. The garden and the orchard haven’t been tended in years. I don’t think anything has grown there since we left. When he’s sober enough, he does odd jobs for people in town who have good memories of Jacob, but they’re really just giving Bear handouts.”
I felt sick. All three of our lives—mine, Amir’s, Bear’s—had changed the moment I met the Langfords. The thought that Bear was now someone I would not recognize wrenched something inside of me. I was surprised to find myself worried about him. I had tried to stop loving him, but I had never succeeded.
“I should go up there,” I said.
“Don’t feel sorry for him. He did this to himself.”
“But still—”
“He hurt us. He was supposed to take care of us but instead he hurt us. I still have trouble sleeping—I wake up with the weight of Bear on my chest, pinning me down. In my sleep, I’m a little boy who doesn’t have the strength to fight back. I wake up swinging my arms at the air, relieved that I can move them, that if I needed to I could finally stop him from hurting us. But what does that matter now?” Amir’s expression was so haunted that I longed to take him in my arms. “Have you forgotten what it was like, Merrow? Bear doesn’t deserve your kindness.”
“I haven’t forgotten. Even if I wanted to forget, his letters keep his voice in my ear.”
Amir was silent for a moment. His eyes narrowed as he looked out at the water. “Rei had a pulmonary embolism. There was an autopsy. A friend of mine looked into it for me years ago. Bear knows how she died. He knows that we didn’t have anything to do with it. He’s been blackmailing you over nothing. He knows exactly what his letters do to you.”
My heart thudded in my ears. Time would never diminish Bear’s cruelty.
Still, when I felt for it, the sliver of love that I felt for my brother needled me.
“When Doctor Clark and Rei’s lawyer came to our house to let us know that the money Rei had left us was missing,” I told Amir, “Bear didn’t tell them that you had disappeared on the same night. He could have had the police chasing you, but hedidn’t. After all those years of hating you, in the end, he kept you safe.”
Confusion flickered in Amir’s gaze. He looked away from me. “Even if you go up there, you won’t find him. I told him he needed to get off my property.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s mine now. His share of Horseshoe Cliff. I won it from him in a few games of poker.”
“Amir!”
“Don’t look at me like that. Bear forced me to sleep in a shed when I was a kid. We lived in the most beautiful place on earth, and he managed to give me nightmares. Believe me, taking that land was the most peaceful of the retributions I’ve considered.”
“But you said he’s a drunk—”
“He wasn’t drunk when he signed this contract.” He pulled a folded paper from his pocket. Bear’s signature was scratched at the bottom. “I made him sign it when he was in the middle of painting someone’s house in town. He was sober enough to know what he was doing. He didn’t even argue with me. So now I own two shares, and you own the third. Horseshoe Cliff is yours and mine.”
I hardly knew how to respond. “Was he drunk when you won the card game?”
He slipped the contract back into his pocket. “It wasn’t just one card game. I stayed there for three nights, and every night he wanted to gamble another piece of his land. He kept losing,but he insisted we keep playing. He knew what he was doing. He could have stopped the whole thing, and he didn’t.”
If time had mellowed my hatred of my brother, I could not expect that Amir’s feelings would always match my own. We were not the same person, no matter how often it had felt like we had shared our thoughts when we were children.
“So this is why you came back,” I said. “For revenge.”
Amir held my gaze with his velvet, dark-rimmed eyes. “No. I’d like to never think about Bear again. I’d like to find a way to move past the way he treated us. No, Merrow, revenge is not the reason I came back.”
