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“It does,” Henri said, as Bailey reached for a beer and then handed him one too. “Can I ask you something? You don’t have to tell me. I’m just curious.”
“Of course,” Bailey said as he twisted the top off.
“How long ago did you lose them?”
Bailey reached for another shrimp, and then he met Henri’s stare head-on. “It was five years, this year.”
“This year?”
“Yes. They died a week before July fourth.”
HENRI DIDN’T KNOW what to say, which was a first. What had started out as a flirty afternoon at a secret hideaway to forget had quickly turned serious when he’d somehow managed to transport Bailey back to an even worse period of his life.
Poor Bailey. Henri couldn’t begin to imagine the pain he must’ve suffered, losing not one, but both parents at once. Henri had no clue what it was like to be loved by a person whose blood ran through your veins. But judging by Bailey’s somber tone, it was a sadness you never got over.
“I’m sorry,” Henri finally said. “I didn’t mean to bring up something so painful.”
Bailey had once said his family was close, that the house he lived in was where they’d all grown up, and Henri had to wonder how Bailey was able to live there now. How did you walk through a house and see memory after memory of the people you had lost and still come out on the other side smiling, still come out as rounded as Bailey was? Henri would be a total fucking mess, of that he was sure.
“Don’t be,” Bailey said, his voice soft. “I’m glad you asked. I want to tell you about them. I want you to know me, and I want to know you. Even these harder things.”
As Henri stared into those earnest blue eyes, his stomach knotted and his heart broke a little. Because while he wanted exactly what Bailey had just said, he also knew it could never be like that. It could never be that simple.
Not for him…not for them.
“It was the week before the Fourth of July,” Bailey said, and Henri took a sip of his beer for something to do with his hands. “Mom and Dad went to this barbecue that they and their friends had every year. It was my father’s rookie class at the academy, and they’d all been friends forever.”
Bailey chuckled. “Some of those guys were—are—like second fathers to me. They’d been in our lives since I was born, since Sean was…and anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. They went to the barbecue and had a great afternoon, we were later told, but on their way home, they were in a car accident.”
Henri’s fingers tightened around the neck of his Corona as he watched Bailey closely, looking for signs that he needed something more. But his cop was focused right now, intent on getting through this as quickly as possible, so Henri kept quiet and made sure not to interfere.
“Their car was totaled, completely destroyed in the crash,” Bailey said as though relaying a scene from work. “It clipped the front end of a red Toyota Camry and flipped several times.”
Bailey clamped his teeth down into his lower lip, the first sign that the story had gotten to him, and Henri reached for his arm.
“They died instantly,” Bailey said as he looked at Henri, and while there was grief and pain swirling in those blue depths, there was also something Henri had seen just recently—anger—and he couldn’t help but wonder who that emotion was reserved for. God, maybe?
“I know I keep saying this.” Henri squeezed Bailey’s forearm. “But I’m sorry you had to go through that. To lose both of them at once? I can’t even begin to imagine how painful that must’ve been for you and your brothers.”
Bailey’s eyes creased at the sides as he offered up a half-smile and acknowledged Henri’s words the way someone does when they’re trying their best to keep their real feelings locked inside.
“It was painful. Unimaginably so. But what was truly devastating, what was—and still is—the most difficult part of losing them, was finding out a day later that at the time of the accident, your father, the man you thought hung the moon, had been so far over the legal alcohol limit that it was a miracle he could walk from the park to the car in the first place.”
Oh fuck.
Bailey’s lips pulled tight. “Right?”
It took Henri a second, but then he realized he’d said that out loud and nodded. “Bailey…I—”
“I know. It’s so fucked up.” Bailey shook his head. “Here was this man, a decorated police officer who’d been on the force for over twenty years. Known to all his buddies as a stand-up guy, a dedicated father, a loving husband who everyone looked up to—who I looked up to. And that night? That night, he decided that instead of being any of those things, he was going to be a drunk. And then he got in a car with my mom.”
