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Zara comes out of the kitchen and spots me. “Hey, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.” She walks over to me. “Em said you couldn’t make it for coffee. She and Kim just left.” Her eyes drag over me, and she frowns.
I changed into jeans and a T-shirt after Lucas stormed out of the house, but the rest of me resembles the hot mess Kellan found when he came over.
“What’s wrong?” I attempt a smile, but my lips can’t remember how to curve into one.
“Excuse me,” a woman our age says. She’s tall and gorgeous with flawless ebony skin and black textured curls that brush her shoulders. She must be a tourist. I’ve never seen her before. “Do you by any chance know where I can find Aiden Hensley?”
Zara and I exchange a puzzled glance.
I bite my lip, struggling to keep everything I’ve temporarily locked away—the anniversary, Lucas’s reaction to the news, how much I miss my brother—from bleeding out like a ruptured spleen. “He’s dead. He died almost three years ago.” There’s a brittle edge to my voice, a fine-grit roughness to my tone.
The woman’s eyes widen and her lips part in surprise. “I didn’t realize. What happened?”
“How did you know him?” I’m not ready to admit the cause of death yet.
“Um, well, he and I hooked up three years ago next week. I was moving to London for my job, but we agreed if we were both single when I returned to the U.S, we would hook up again. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, so I went to his old place but no one answered. Guess I should have waited for him to email back.” She huffs out a soft breath, the corners of her gloss-slicked lips dipping down. “He was such a fun and sweet guy. I can’t believe he’s dead.”
Fun and sweet?
I mean, sure, until he changed during his last tour with the Marines, he had been a fun and sweet guy. But, if her dates are correct, he committed suicide two weeks after they hooked up. I’m not an expert on suicide, but unless something happened between when she last saw him and when he ended his life, she’s not describing someone struggling with depression.
Not unless he was faking being happy.
Was that even possible? I’m not suicidal, but I had a nearly impossible time dragging myself out of bed this morning. I don’t have the energy to fake being happy. Not in the way she just described my brother.
“He committed suicide,” I tell her, watching her reaction.
Surprise returns to her face, and she takes a step as if forced back by the blast of my news. “He did? Are we talking about the same Aiden? The man I met was stressed about something—he wouldn’t tell me what it was. But he told me things would be better in a few days. Justice would finally prevail.”
“Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” Zara asks her.
The woman shakes her head. “We were too busy making the most of what little time we had left before I had to leave for the airport.”
We ask her a few more questions. Kya answers them as best as she can. They had agreed not to keep in contact while she was away. No strings attached. No expectations. But even then, she’s visibly shaken at the news of my brother’s death.
She leaves Treats looking crushed and heartbroken.
“Did Kya’s description of Aiden match how you remember him before he…?” I can’t get my mouth to form the words left unspoken.
“I don’t really remember. I didn’t see him much after he retired from the military. At first when I saw him, he had the same vacant expression as Lucas. Both were zombies in those early days. After Lucas left for Seattle, I didn’t see Aiden as much. He hung out at the Veterans Center more than he did here or anywhere else.”
I didn’t know any of that. Lucas hasn’t mentioned it.
And Grams also failed to mention it.
I’d seen Aiden off and on when I knew Lucas wasn’t around, but I’d been dealing with my own grief. I’d missed the signs Aiden was struggling. We had talked on the phone fairly regularly, but even then I’d missed the signs. Just like he had missed the ones that said I was also dealing with my own pain.
We had both managed to hide secrets from each other.
“After a while, he looked less like a zombie,” Zara says. “It was as if he had found a reason to return to the land of the living. When he died, I assumed something had happened since the last time I’d seen him. It had been a few months.”
Maybe that’s why Grams was so surprised when he died. She hadn’t known he was struggling with depression, even though she saw him once a week. It’s possible he was great at hiding it. But I have a hard time believing that.
“I’m going away to my grandfather’s cabin for a few days,” I tell Zara, doing my best to sound upbeat despite everything we’ve just learned.
If Zara’s expression is anything to go by, I’m as close to sounding upbeat as the Arctic is to Antarctica. Her gaze leaves me naked and vulnerable and wondering if she can peer deep into my soul. “What’s going on with you, Simone?”
“What do you mean?”
