She looked up to find him staring at her, his expression cryptic. If he dared to argue with her, if he offered so much as a breath of contradiction, she would lose it, she just knew she would.
He inhaled a breath and then let it halfway out. “You’re right,” he said. “I was being stupid.”
Lord, thought Lily, his honesty was amazing. He was amazing. A few weeks ago he was some playboy golfer with nothing but his own selfish interests at heart. Now he had put all that aside and was willing to admit a mistake. She’d never really seen a man do that before.
He was trying to learn how this worked, to knit these wounded children into a family, and he was so sincere that it broke her heart.
“Thank you,” she said softly. Then it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him the truth—the truth about what happened to Evan and the way it still haunted her. She had never said a word to anyone, not to her parents or even to Violet. Now she astounded herself by saying, “I know you think I overreacted, but there’s a reason for that. I lost someone close to me a long time ago. It was an accidental drowning.”
“Jesus, Lily. I’m sorry to hear that.”
She took his arm and pulled him out to the screened porch to make sure they were out of earshot of Charlie. And out of the light. For some reason, she knew she wouldn’t be able to talk about this in the light. “There used to be three children in our family, but my brother Evan…well, he didn’t survive being a Robinson.” She paused, weighing the burden crushing down on her, wondering if it could possibly be shifted. “If you ask my parents, he didn’t survive me.”
“You just said he drowned.”
She nodded. “I was right next to him in the bathtub when it happened.”
“Jesus,” he said again. “So you were a kid, right?”
“Three years old.”
“And your brother…?”
“He never saw his first birthday.” All her life, Lily had tried to recapture that night. She could still feel herself deep in the fluffy softness of Mr. Bubble, but she had never been able to remember Evan beside her. She sometimes wondered if, without her mother’s reminders, she would recall the incident at all.
She scarcely remembered Evan, either. Occasional flashes and flickers of memory, nothing more. A glint of light upon a smooth baby cheek, that was all. The sound of a soft cry in the night. When she looked at old family photos, she saw them together, and judging by those photos, she adored her brother.
Lily sometimes wondered what Evan would be like if he’d survived. She found herself studying men his age, trying to imagine her brother all grown up. Would he be tall and substantial like Violet, or small and slight like Lily? Would he be gregarious, successful, emotional, reserved? She couldn’t even begin to imagine how different her own life would be, had he survived. Maybe then she wouldn’t be so cautious and reserved. She might trust herself to fall in love, make a family, be a mother.
The gathering darkness had the closed-in feel of a confessional. She’d been raised Catholic but had never gained absolution no matter how many times she recited the Act of Contrition. “I always thought I should remember such a huge disaster,” she told Sean. “How can I not remember it? How is it that my brother, my own flesh and blood, slipped underwater and drowned with me right next to him? How did I fail to notice?” A thousand times, she had asked herself why she hadn’t reached out and grabbed his wet, slippery arm to pull him to safety.
“You were three years old, that’s how,” Sean stated. “A baby. The question I have is, where were your parents?”
“There was some emergency with Violet, and my mother stepped out for one minute,” Lily said. “Three, tops.” She braided her fingers together. “Sometimes I think what came after was even worse. My mother was investigated for neglect, and Violet and I were sent to a foster home for a time, though I have no memory of that, either. When we came home, everything was different. We were a family who forgot how to be happy.” She shivered, although the night was balmy with the promise of summer. “So that’s it. To this day I have no idea exactly what happened, but my