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The four of them were coming home from a Christmas tree farm one December night when they ran into a freak snowstorm. The roads were slick and winding, and there wasn’t a star in the sky to light the way home.
The newspaper articles I’ve found say they hit a snowplow head on, coming over the top of a hill. The station wagon my father was driving spun several times before flipping upside down into a nearby ravine.
Everyone perished that day except my father, who somehow walked away with some bruised ribs and a few cuts and scrapes.
The number of times my father has spoken about that night I can count on one hand.
He said it took him years to find peace with what happened, though last I heard, he never fully forgave himself.
He wasn’t looking for love when he met our mother.
He was shopping for a new wallet for himself one random August day, and she happened to be the sales associate who rang him up. She was funny, he said, making one-liners and cracking jokes the whole time. He recalled that it was the first time someone had made him smile in years. Before he left her shop, he asked what her favorite restaurant was, and then he asked her out on a date, taking her to said restaurant later that week.
The rest, as they say, is history—until twenty-five years later, when my mother suffered a brain aneurysm in her sleep. Earlier that same night, he held her in his arms as she drifted off, breathing peacefully, neither of them knowing that one of those breaths would be her last.
She was only forty-five.
“You still haven’t told me,” he says, “what you think of Briar for Burke.”
“I think they’re all wrong for each other.”
He chuffs. “What makes you say that? They’re perfect together.”
I shrug, picking at a loose thread in my board shorts. “You asked for my opinion. I gave it to you.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Not really.”
“I see.” He adjusts his posture. “When I’m gone, all you three will have is each other. I hope someday you’ll be able to forgive Burke for what he did, and that you’ll all be able to be happy for each other as you move forward in this life.”
“Mm-hmm,” I say to appease him.
His brows knit as he studies me.
“If this is about Audrina, you have to let it go. If not for them, then for yourself. For your health. Anger only ever hurts the one who holds it.”
“God, no. It’s not about her. That was a lifetime ago.” While it wasn’t ideal at the time—my older brother stealing my fiancée out from under me—it taught me a barrage of invaluable lessons . . . a diamond ring is meaningless, your own flesh and blood is perfectly capable of screwing you over, and placing your happiness in someone else’s hands is a stupid and reckless move.
Though that last lesson I didn’t learn until last week, when I watched my brother introduce the woman of my dreams—a woman I had every intention of spending forever with—as his future wife.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BRIAR
Present Day
“Wow . . . I . . . I’m so sorry.” I swipe a generous tear from my cheek as I offer Redmond a bittersweet smile. An hour ago, I came downstairs to grab a glass of water before bed, not expecting to bump into Burke’s father doing the same thing. He invited me to pull up a stool to the island, and we made small talk. Only somewhere along the line, the conversation detoured, and he ended up giving me a rundown of his life’s tragedies—beginning with his first wife and daughters dying in a car accident and ending with his second wife dying in his arms in her sleep. “I had no idea about any of that.”
“Burke doesn’t tend to dwell in the past,” he says. “Sometimes you have to pry these sorts of details out of him with your bare hands.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“The thing about us Rothwells is, when we love someone, we love them with everything we have, even if it isn’t always obvious,” he says. “We tend to hide our emotions under our sleeves instead of wearing them on the outside. I wasn’t always the way I am. My second wife is the one who brought out this side of me. I’m hopeful that you’ll one day do the same for Burke. He needs that, you know. Someone to make him smile the way his mother used to make me smile.”
Thinking back to the events of the past week, I can only recall Burke smiling a small handful of times, and even then, I don’t think it was because he was charmed by any stretch of the imagination.
“You seem like you still have so much love to give,” I say. “Did you ever try and move on again? Or can a person move on at all after losing the love of their life twice in a row?”
