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Harrison’s chest tightened. His hands balled into fists as he wished to kick those flowers away, beat every bloom off every stem and scream for the world to hear what a fucking monster Ward Montgomery truly was.
“Do you want to take them? Maybe Erin would want them.”
He couldn’t bring himself to touch them. “No. Just leave them there.”
The cold winter air webbed across his heart like ice. Glaring at the front door of the store at the still aisles and dark displays of tools inside, he heard his childhood voice shaking with fear as he tried to face down his dad time and time again.
His gaze fastened on the rack of framing hammers, and he remembered his father snatching one off the wall one day and hurling it at him. Mr. McCullough had come by to pick up some chicken wire for his fence that day. Harrison always wondered if that front bell hadn’t rung, if his father would done more than thrown a hammer at him.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Her gloved hand curled around the sleeve of his jacket. There was no disguising the tension flexing through every overwrought muscle in his body. He couldn’t bear the weight of her touch, so he paced.
Spotting a rock sitting beside the plowed drift, he debated picking it up and hurling it through the front window, but his dad wasn’t here to clean up the mess, and any damage would fall to Erin.
Erin.
God.
How many days had he tricked himself into not thinking about her? Not worrying? He was a fucking coward. A decent brother would have done more to protect her.
“Harrison?”
“Why is she having a funeral for him?” he snapped.
He didn’t understand why Erin needed this. He wanted to be there for her, but he couldn’t stomach her compassion for a man who terrorized and beat them. “She hated him. I know she did.”
Mariella frowned. “Your father?”
He shook his head, of course Mariella wouldn’t understand. No one would, because like good little victims, they did everything in their power to protect their abuser.
He wished he could spell it out for her, but he couldn’t. There was too much. Too many lies. The entire town was brainwashed and blind. Not a single one of them ever looking beyond the flimsy excuses they offered to explain the scrapes and bruises that took time to heal.
“The whole town loved him,” he rasped, the words tearing up his throat like blades of glass.
Mariella took a slow step toward him, but his eyes remained locked on the storefront. “Love’s a powerful word, Harrison. True, he was part of our community. We all went to him whenever a screen needed fixin’ or something wasn’t working right around the house, but very few of us actually knew him. He was a store owner, willing to open on a Sunday if a blizzard was coming. That made him a part of Jasper Falls, but none of us had anything close to a real relationship with him.”
“I think about the things people will say, and I want to hit something.”
“What are people saying?”
“How great he was. What a good man he was.” He ground his molars. “They loved him.”
Her brow pinched. “Sometimes, we love the wrong people—people who do very little to deserve our love. And sometimes we don’t like the people we love, but we can’t stop loving them despite knowing they don’t deserve us. We can’t beat ourselves up for loving people, Harrison. Better to love than to hate. Hate is a much heavier burden to carry.”
Her words were too much, too honest and on the money. While their father made sure everyone else’s houses functioned smoothly, their home had fallen apart. Dysfunction seeped from every room, yet no one ever noticed the source of such damage. So why did he feel like Mariella could suddenly see every filthy secret he hid?
He picked up the rock and fisted it in his hand.
Mariella stepped in front of him, now gripping his wrists and demanding he look at her. “Did I tell you what it was like for me when Bran and I finally broke up?”
His brow crimped in confusion, his focus divided between her and the store. “What about it?”
“Everyone kept telling me how pretty I was. Anytime I was sad, or needed to cry, that was their reply. You’re too pretty to cry over some guy. He doesn’t deserve you. You could get anyone you want. None of that was true, though. I couldn’t get anyone I wanted. And it hurt to feel so alone and rejected. It didn’t matter what shape I was in on the outside. Inside, I was wrecked.”
“You did deserve better.” He was at least certain of that. She deserved better than Bran Dawson and better than the way he’d left things.
“I know everything isn’t always as perfect as it appears, Harrison. People see what they want to see, and they tend to avoid the uncomfortable stuff. The more something hurts, the harder people try not to see it.”
