Page 5 of Lost and Found

“Ah yes. Wallowing can be a full-time job,” he replies casually. “I admire your commitment to it.”

Oh, this motherfucker. “Uh, I’ve been doing a lot more than wallowing!” I laugh in pure indignation, high-pitched and humorless. The cold is gone, replaced by something fiery.

“Such as?” He widens his stance and starts rifling around the inside of his navy suit jacket, completely unperturbed.

I sputter over a few sounds before I reply, “I’ve been working six days a week, getting my house ready to rent, I moved in with my parents . . .” All things I’m certain his nosy ass knows, sincethis town has fewer than one thousand people in it and he’s usually the first in everyone’s business. I feel a small thrill when I realize I have at least one update that’ll shock him. I cross my arms and lean on a hip. Let my eyes travel the length of him as he tips up his flask and takes a drink. “And trying to get pregnant.”

He chokes, and it’s supremely satisfying. He’s still coughing and pounding his fist on his chest when I brush past him and head deeper into the garage toward the house. “Glad we got caught up, Si.”

“’Fraid I’m still a little behind, Red,” I hear him wheeze. I turn to throw him a look over my shoulder and find him reaching for me again. He takes his hand back and coughs into it. “Save me a dance?” he says.

More memories shuffle through my brain like cards in a deck. A red-orange boutonniere, his palm over my pulse, sea-green sequins catching in the lights as their wearer hurried away. Merritt with her beautiful complexion and her incredible chocolate hair, crying angry tears. Merritt in a hospital bed, applying makeup to her colorless face, smiling shyly as Silas handed her a bouquet, her downy head backlit by the sun.

Silasin a hospital bed, too, a collection of wires and wrappings, a ventilator inflating his lungs. Him in that same hospital bed, up and cracking jokes and making the staff blush.

So much history. Too much history and not enough time. Life, death, happiness, despair.

“Say yes, Ruby,” he adds, softer now. “I promise to make you mad again, if that’ll help.”

I study his perfectly imperfect face, the bump on his nose he earned his sophomore year when he took a baseball to it. I should have figured he’d annoyed me on purpose. He’s always had a read on me like that.

“It did help,” I admit. Felt good to feel something other than everything else I’ve been fighting off for all these months, however fleeting. “I’ll save you a dance.”

The whole exchange leaves me calmer. Like letting my emotions lash out allowed me to settle back down into something functional. I find my mom and offer her a smile when I emerge from the house a few minutes later, and for once, the palpable hope in her grin doesn’t set off my guilt.

We filter into the small stable that the Byrds have set up for the ceremony on account of the rain, and it’s beautiful and lovely and so very them. Origami birds hang from the ceiling, flowers and hay litter the floors, and a couple of horses stick their heads out of their stalls to watch it all take place alongside a small group of us from town.

Admittedly, I do my best to tune out quite a bit. I’m worried if I let myself happy cry, it’ll open the floodgates for everything else. But I am delighted and surprised when I see Silas at the head of the aisle, officiating the whole thing. I find myself watching him speak when Wren and Ellis are there, staring at one another with a lifetime’s worth of love in their eyes. I watch Silas’s mouth move, even as I actively try not to hear what he’s saying, like I might brace myself against the swell of emotion his speech brings.

My hold on myself slips at a few points. First, when I hear him say, “My brother has saved my life in the literal sense, more than once, so when I fell off a mountain in a ball of fire, all that went through my head was holding on long enough for him to find me. It never once occurred to me that he wouldn’t.”

And again, when he says, “What is bravery, if not hope in action?”

I know it’s about Wren and Ellis, and how hoping against their own odds is what brought them together in the first place, even after having a baby as teenagers, and what brought themback together after they dropped Sam off at college last summer. But of course I make it about Merritt, how much hope she’d had and how it helped her brave the worst of things, even in death.

But this is also when Silas’s eyes find me, and the big bastardwinks. He winks like it’s all some smug act and not the most earnest tribute he’s given in his life. Either way, that wink puts me on solid ground again. One of my salty tears dissolves on my tongue when it meets my silent chuckle.

I could use more of this feeling, whatever it is. Like relief, but sweeter. I am suddenly glad that I came today, even if it’s just a distraction and everything else is still waiting for me outside of tonight.

I’m even looking forward to a dance.

CHAPTER 2

Now

Silas

I’ve heard it said that rain is good luck on a wedding day. That is all well and good, and truly, I want nothing but the best for my brother and Wren going forward forever, but . . . enough is enough already.

We’re forty-five minutes into the reception and the weather still hasn’t let up. I recruited my future brother-in-law, Fisher, to help me bring in a few tables to spread across the barn, and then my sister quickly stepped in, moving flowers and decorations around until she managed to make everything look like it was meant to be this way. I start searching for Sage again, now, to see if she has any ideas on what we can do about dancing. There’s only enough room for one or two couples inside the barn.

“If you’re looking for Bea, I just saw her over by the food tables.”

I turn to my eldest brother with a dull look but drop it when I see the drink he’s holding aloft for me. “Looking for Sage, actually,” I tell Ellis, before I take it and clink the glass to his.

“She snuck off with Fisher after they brought in the rest of the food. Probably defiling some corner of my house as we speak,” he says into his whiskey.

“And yet you remain spectacularly unbothered,” I laugh.