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“What was it like here when it was just you and Kier?” The question came out in a rush, one I’d wanted to ask but wasn’t certain he would answer.
He hesitated.“You mean… toward the end?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
He didn’t speak. The silence so drawn-out, I feared he never would again. Then:“It was sad at times… most of the time. Peaceful in others.”
“Peaceful?” I couldn’t imagine how.
“He accepted his fate early on… never fought it when he discovered the chemo hadn’t worked. Those final few weeks were spent eating the food he liked, watching the films he loved… yours mostly. He was on strong medication so was never in much pain.”
That did little to ease me.“And when it wasn’t peaceful?”
“Horrific.” His voice cracked down the middle.
And the pain… the pain I’d carried in my heart all these months stretched until it encompassed my entire chest. I felt like I couldn’t breathe around it. I held him tighter.“I’m so sorry.”
His face pressed into my hair.“Where were you, April?” I’d asked my question and this was his, the one he’d held in all these weeks.“You never came back. Why?”
Tears pricked my eyes.“Because I didn’t know.” I thought the truth might feel like a weight off my chest, but it felt like an excuse.
“He didn’t tell you?” His tone was a palette of surprise and scepticism.
“No.”
His heart began to thunder beneath my cheek.“He told me he did. I asked him point-blank, and he replied,‘She said she’s too busy.’”
Oh, Kier.Something sharp lodged itself in my throat.“I swear I didn’t—”
“I know.” His reassurance was instantaneous.“Now that I actually think about it, that’s exactly the type of shit Kier would pull. Fuck.” His eyes squeezed shut.“The things I said, I’m so sorry—”
He didn’t get what I was trying to say. I pushed to sit, but we remained tangled. The palm of my left hand pressed flat against his chest, directly above his heart.“Ishouldhave known. I phoned him two weeks before he died and he sounded off. When I asked, he fed me some bullshit about having a cold, I should have pressed harder.”
“There was no way you could have known if he didn’t want you to.”
“I could have visited more.” He didn’t respond because he had no reassurances to offer me. I should have visited more and we both knew it.
I could tell Mal about the money, the reason for our estrangement, but all it would do was hurt him. And with Kier gone, all the gambling and the debt no longer angered me as it once had. When I thought of it now, all I felt was sorrow. He must have been suffocating beneath the weight of all his worries without a single person to turn to. More tears gathered. As if Mal sensed them, the light on the bedside table flicked on and he came into view. A lavender glow from the lampshade painted half of his face, making the line of his cheekbone cut like a knife above his trimmed beard. Reclined beneath me, he looked cosy and rumpled among my sheets. I wanted to tie his hands to the metal frame and keep him there forever. If he were in my bed every night, I knew I wouldn’t wake each morning with the same empty ache in my chest. He would dispel every lonely thought from my brain, the way he’d kept the monsters at bay tonight.
He watched me too. Eyes tracing over my cheeks to my lips and down the slope of my neck. What did he see when he looked at me? April Sinclair, failed film star? April Murphy, failed granddaughter? Those tears fell slowly, like the first drops of rain before a downpour. A warning to take cover. My eyes closed, not wanting to witness the moment he climbed from my bed and left. Mal didn’t deal in emotions, especially the messy kind.
That’s why the touch on my cheek was such a shock, I almost drew back. He pushed up on his elbow, his hand so large it almost encompassed the entire left side of my face. Work-worn fingers dipped into the hair at my temple while this thumb swept a line from my jaw up to the corner of my eye, catching a single tear. The drag of his calluses made me shiver. He must have mistaken it for the beginnings of a sob because he shuffled even closer, bending the knee my leg was hooked over, half dragging me into his lap. He was so tall, that even with my extra height, his lips sat at my hairline. I felt the tickle of his next words through the coiled strands.“If he’d asked you to be here, would you have returned?”
“Of course.” I didn’t even have to think about it.
That hand slid to my jaw, thumb landing at the corner of my lips as he titled my head back to look at him. His eyes bore into mine and my next breath went absolutely nowhere. He’d never looked at me like that before. So fully, like he wanted me to know I had all of his attention.“Don’t blame yourself. Don’t place his choice on your shoulders. We may not understand it, but it was the way he wanted it.”
The way he wanted it.
“What if he didn’t want me here because he didn’t want me in his life?”What if he never really loved me… like my mother didn’t?
He mulled over his answer.
That was one of my favourite things about him. He didn’t talk totalk, didn’t say the first thing that came to mind like most men I knew. If you asked him a question, he thought it through, gave it the time it deserved. You might not like the answer you received, but you’d know it was the truth.
“He loved you,” he finally said, hitting the proverbial nail square on the head.“He was so proud of you.”
“Really? He said that?”
