All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,98

to his grandfather, and Poppy Beaufort had sat Jimmy on his knees and played clapping games with him for hours at a time.

Jimmy’s mother told him sadly that his poppy was gone to the same place his father had gone, and Jimmy had asked, in all innocence, “Iwo Jima?”

His mother had laughed, sputtering tears, and Jimmy was left in the same confusion as before.

So now, when all the grownups were wearing black on this dreary rainy day, Jimmy was making plans to visit Iwo Jima someday, to see his father and his poppy. Maybe his poppy would recognize him in this old wool coat.

He was holding so tightly to Aunty Bridget and Aunty Sophie’s hands that he didn’t even notice when the brass button popped off the cuff. Bridget and Sophie didn’t worry so much with buttons and cuffs as his mother, so Jimmy kept holding on to them even after he saw it missing, all the time planning to visit a faraway place where his father and grandfather would read him stories and let him come in from the cold.

TUCKER HELD in his palm the dirt-encrusted bronze button with a sailing ship impressed across the front.

The bit of nylon thread that had come loose from Jimmy’s coat still trailed from the post in the back.

“Perfect,” Tucker breathed.

“Oh, Bridget, look!” Sophie exclaimed. “My brush and your pin, and see? The letter from James.”

Tucker looked up quickly, and Angel didn’t understand the panic in his eyes. This was their job, wasn’t it? To tell the stories of the dead so they could pass gently into the next world? The women, touching those objects that held such strong memories, would simply pass over, but the thought seemed to hurt Tucker in ways that Angel didn’t understand.

“No, ladies, not yet, please—”

Sophie reached into the box and lifted the brush and the letter with one hand and pressed Bridget’s pin into her hand with the other.

“Oh, boys,” Sophie said, fading diaphanously into the shadows. “Thank you for the lovely summer day. Send my brother if you can. We miss him.”

Bridget’s blue eyes remained bright, though the rest of her was transparent as glass. “And you two don’t put off yer own fine love, if you can help it!” she cautioned, and then….

They were gone. Leaving Tucker on the ground clutching a brass button, an almost empty box beside him on the grass.

“No!” The cry was ripped from him, open grief for women long dead. Angel sank to his knees next to him and wrapped his arm around Tucker’s shoulders, holding him close.

“Tucker. Tucker, you knew this would happen—”

“Oh, Angel, I was going to give them their things. I wanted to tell them goodbye, and I wanted to see them happy in the house by the river. I wanted to tell that story too!”

Of course he would. Angel dropped a kiss in his hair, knowing he couldn’t feel a thing but hoping. “It’s okay—we’ve met them. We know that story. They don’t need us to tell it to them. Nobody needs absolution or catharsis for two lovers living a long and happy life.”

“But….” Tucker wiped his eyes on his shirt and sagged into his spot in the shade. “Angel, I just need to…. God! Don’t you just want to know there’s a happy ending?”

“Of course I do!” Angel told him, the bitterness welling, blood in an old wound that he couldn’t remember sustaining. “But they had their happy ending, and you haven’t. I’d rather work to get you your ending than see someone who’s lived a happy and full life live theirs. That’s their story, Tucker.”

Tucker turned a tear-ridden face toward him. “But it’s the only happy ending we’re likely to get,” he whispered. He was as destroyed as a child, as innocent as Jimmy hoping his father and grandfather were in Iwo Jima. The cynicism, the bitterness—it had washed away under Angel’s hands four nights before, and Angel had given him no armor to replace it.

Angel opened his mouth to say something, anything at all, but he could make no promises.

He couldn’t even kiss Tucker’s tears away.

Stay

TUCKER STOPPED for In-N-Out on the way home, so dispirited he almost forgot and asked Angel what he wanted.

When he realized what he’d almost done, he changed his fries to “animal style” on general principles.

In a life filled with strangers touching his body, he couldn’t ever remember needing the touch of one person—casual or intimate—so much in his life.

Angel’s tentative voice broke into his savage mastication of a