I gripped Cheska’s hand so tight, I worried I’d hurt her. But I opened the door, the frigid wind slapping our faces, and led her from the car. Cheska wrapped the blanket around her to stave off the bitter cold, and I felt the familiar soil underneath my shoes and breathed in the fresh air. There was no smog and pollution in this air, not like in London.
“So peaceful.” Cheska leaned her cheek against my arm. “Show me,” she said. “Show me why you loved it so much. Why she loved it so much.” My mum.
This was Cheska fucking meeting my mum.
“This way.” I walked with my bird around the few acres we owned. Through the grove of trees and the kitchen garden that Pearl and Mum had planted long ago, now overgrown and wild, the planters rotting and faded in colour. Cheska never let go of my arm. And with every step, I felt the fucking loss of my sister and mum pierce deeper and deeper. Like it should have years ago.
We came back from the path that led to the garden, and I stopped dead at the place where the cottage once sat. My lungs squeezed like someone was crushing them in their fist. My heart thudded faster and faster, as if it would burst from my chest, and my stomach clenched so tight I thought my muscles might rip in two.
Kissing the back of Cheska’s hand, I let go of her fingers and took a step forward. My legs felt like lead as I forced them to make it to the centre of where the house once stood. I tipped my head to the night sky and could smell the smoke that would have engulfed the space. Thick, black smoke wiping out the heavy scent of the roses my sister and mum had planted around the borders.
Roses … Cheska always smelled of roses too.
I opened my eyes and blinked, every move of my eyelids dropping a tear to my cheeks. The wind took them away as quickly as they came. So I fucking shed more. I shed more and more, damn sinful Adley holy water cleansing the air for my mum and sister. Tributes to their lives. Lives taken by our dark underworld, by some branded fuckers who had been secretly tearing apart my family for too many years to count.
I dropped my head and bent down. My hand raked though the patch of mud under my feet. The earth fell through my fingers. Tears ran down from my cheeks and dripped onto the soil, joining the unseen ash of the family members I loved most of all.
Artie. I closed my eyes as I heard my mum calling my name like she was right behind me. I could feel her hand on my shoulder. Smell the strong, expensive perfume Dad used to buy her every Christmas. I love you, my boy, she whispered in my ear. My sweet, sweet boy. I’ve missed you.
“I’ve missed you too, Mum,” I whispered back.
And I fucking broke. My shoulders shook as the years and years of grief poured out of me onto the Cotswolds ground. My botched, stitched-up heart was ripping open and bleeding out beneath me, on the very ground that had held my mum and sister’s bodies as they burned, as they breathed their last breaths. My hands and knees planted onto the earth, and I shattered apart.
I fought to breathe as I saw that video in my mind. I mentally retraced the steps of the fucker on the screen pouring petrol on the house and trapping my family inside. He’d struck the match and tossed it onto the fuel with no fucking care at all that he was killing my mum. My fucking mum. My sister. My annoying little sister who I just wanted, so fucking badly, to annoy me for just one more day.
Arms surrounded me, and I turned my head in to Cheska’s chest. “I’m here,” she said, her words wrapping the fuck around me and chasing away the smell of fire that I couldn’t get from my bastard nose, the smoke that was filling up my lungs and taking away any ability to take in fresh air.
“They died,” I said, voice cracking. “They fucking died and I didn’t save them.”
“Couldn’t save them,” Cheska amended. “You were a child.” A child who was busy taking his first life when it all went down.