through empty woods, and now they were full of activity. Vendors were setting up their booths for the day. I window-shopped as I walked by, contemplating a pendant for my costume. Or a hand-tooled leather belt pouch, like the one I’d gotten Cait—okay, nicer than the one I’d gotten Cait. Maybe it was for the best I didn’t come this way very often. April didn’t ask me to contribute, but Chris didn’t pay me all that much. I wasn’t exactly swimming in cash.
Thinking about how empty the woods had looked without the vendors sparked a memory of running into Simon back here. The memory collided with the number twenty-seven in my head, and now I knew what I needed to see.
It took longer than I expected to find the young tree with the memorial plaque to Simon’s brother—the lanes looked so different with the Faire set up around it—and when I did, I found crouching down to be problematic in this outfit. Instead I sat on the ground—thankfully the rain we’d gotten earlier in the week had dried by now, so my skirts wouldn’t get muddy. It was almost like I was at a cemetery, and I wanted to say something. But I’d never met Sean Graham, and I didn’t know what was going on between Simon and me, so I brushed the leaves away from the plaque and sat in contemplative silence.
“I think I understand.” My voice was small, a secret whispered between me and a man who had died years ago.
“Understand what?”
I should have jumped, should have felt guilty that Simon had caught me here. He didn’t know I knew about this place. I was prying. I had no right to be here, a thought that was only underscored when I craned my neck to look up at him. His jaw was set in a hard line as he looked past me to the plaque that held his brother’s name, and his pirate hat with its ridiculous feather hung limply in one hand.
“Understand what?” He turned his eyes to me as he repeated the question, and I was surprised to see no hostility in them. Just curiosity.
I pointed at the plaque. “Of course you didn’t want to go out last Sunday. That was the anniversary of his death, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Simon exhaled in a sigh as he crouched down next to me. “Well, it was Monday, but close enough. Things always feel . . . kind of off this time of year, and the day itself . . . well, it’s a hard day.”
I looked back at the plaque because the sadness on his face was too raw, too intimate. I didn’t have the right to share it. “And twenty-seven.”
“Hmm?”
“He was twenty-seven. Same age you are now.”
“Yeah. That’s . . . yeah.” He deflated the rest of the way, dropping from his crouch to sit cross-legged beside me in the dirt at the side of the lane. “Sean was . . .” He chuckled softly. “A force of nature. You would have liked him. Everyone did. He got all of this going by sheer force of will.” He ran a hand over his cheek, down his jaw. “He was the one who made me become a pirate. He said I was too quiet, too serious all the time. Making me do this—he thought it would give me swagger.” He shook his head and the tiniest smile played around his lips, but his eyes looked brittle. “I didn’t want swagger, but you couldn’t say no to Sean.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. He looked at his brother’s name, etched on the bronze plaque. “After he was gone I had three years. Three years of him still being my older brother. But this year . . .”
“This year you’re twenty-seven.”
“I’m twenty-seven,” he repeated. “I caught up with him.” He ran his fingers over the feather in his hat, pulling at it, his eyes fixed on the plaque. “And in September I’ll hit an age he never did, and I don’t deserve it. I shouldn’t get to have years that he doesn’t.”
“Of course you do.” Out of instinct I reached for him, placed my hand over his before he could shred that poor feather. “He wouldn’t want you to think that.”
“Maybe not.” He turned his hand under mine and grasped it, and we were sitting there holding hands like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I tried for a happier memory. “Chris told me he was