Sweetest in the Gale - Olivia Dade Page 0,18

fix our bikes. Going to Dee’s flute recitals. We didn’t—we didn’t talk about it.” Her eyes searched his. “It was like reading a poem. A novel in a foreign language. Everything required interpretation and translation. Our words, what we did. And when we said we were fine, we were unreliable narrators.”

Through the new lens she’d just offered him, he suspected he could see her more clearly. But he couldn’t use it to study his memories of her, his observations. Not yet.

He needed to keep paying attention. Because she was still crying, and he still didn’t know why. And somehow, while he’d been sorting through his thoughts, she’d entirely misinterpreted his expression and taken his silence for judgment.

“I-I’m not trying to excuse myself, Griff.” She shrank back against the desk, away from his touch, her face crumpling. “I swear on my mother’s grave I’m not. I’m forty-seven years old. I’ve had plenty of time to learn better and find the right words. I’m just trying to explain why—”

For some reason, she was pleading with him, tears pooling beneath both eyes and dripping from her chin, and his scarred heart ripped open along a new axis.

“Sweetheart.” He ducked his head to catch her gaze, hands hovering yet again. “I don’t understand, but I also can’t imagine why you would ever need an excuse for anything. You try your best, Candy. Always. You care. Always. Please stop crying. Please.”

Leaning past her to snatch a tissue, he dried her tears, but they kept coming.

“Dee and I talk—talked—” The sob bucked her body against his, and he tentatively touched her shoulder. When she moved closer, he drew her into his arms. “We talked every week, and last winter, a few months after our father died, I knew something was wrong. Sometimes she was…off. Slurred and giggly one week, dull the next. Not herself.”

The subtext was becoming text, at long last.

Once too spindly and faded to discern, the words were now stark and bold and black on a bone-white page, and he didn’t want to read them. But he knew Candy was poring over them every day, flagellating herself as she read the same story, the same inevitable, tragic ending, again and again.

She deserved some company. Some respite. A new interpretation of the text.

She deserved—

That didn’t bear contemplating, not right now.

Candy’s fingers curled in the cotton of his button-down, and her eyes were huge and agonized. “I got worried, but she always had some reason for it. She had shoulder surgery the week after our father’s funeral, and things went wrong, and they had to go back in. While she was recovering, the pain meds they prescribed made her loopy. Then she said she was tired and punchy from long weeks at work, once she went back. Then she’d tell me she’d just come home from getting drinks with her friends, even though my sister didn’t drink. Not ever, Griff, not after what happened to our mom.”

Candy hadn’t touched the wine at the faculty holiday party. He remembered that now.

Her laugh was sharp. Bitter. “Then she said I was imagining things. Eventually, she blew up at me for mentioning yet again how odd she sounded. She told me to stop h-harping on her and treat her like an adult.”

The pain of that conversation lingered in the waver of her voice, but there was no soothing her now. Uglier revelations were appearing on the horizon, looming in the distance as they rocketed closer, word by word.

“You know what I did, Griff?” She didn’t wait for a response. “I threatened her. Told her I’d fly to Oregon and kick her ass if she didn’t sound more like herself soon. I said I’d put a hit out on her if she didn’t stop worrying me. Because that was clearly going to fix the fucking problem. That was going to get her to talk to me.”

Her hands were fisted now, her knuckles digging into his chest. “I hired a cleaning service to help her around the house while she recovered. I had food delivered. I researched the best post-operative physical therapists in her area.”

Service. Love’s austere and lonely offices.

But she couldn’t see that. Not yet.

“You know what I didn’t do?” She was sneering at herself now, face twisted in grief and self-loathing. “I didn’t realize she’d become addicted to her pain meds, and I didn’t tell her I loved her. M-my—”

Her words were garbled now by her sobbing, but he was paying attention as hard as he could. Holding her.