sealed shut. A DNA test isn’t needed to know Tobias sealed it, though. A hint of the aftershave he wore every day I knew him is lingering on the paper. It’s embedded in almost every inch of this office, revealing he spent more time here when he was home than the main house, meaning I know the best place to leave Isabelle’s envelope.
I’ve only just propped the envelope onto the desk scattered with drawings and old case files when the crunch of gravel under tires sounds through my ears. When I peer out the sliding door I jimmied open only twenty minutes ago, a curse word spills from my lips. Isabelle has slid out of the back of the cab. She’s racing my way.
“I’ll be just a minute, I promise.”
When Isabelle yanks open the sliding door I thankfully remembered to close, I sink into the far corner of the dusty space. Her head slants to the side when her attempt to punch the security code into the box on the side wall is met with a faulty keypad. It’s flashing an alert that the system has been disabled.
“Stupid piece of shit,” Isabelle mumbles under her breath as her eyes stray to a section of the roof that looks only weeks away from succumbing to the weather damage coating it.
When she paces toward the desk where I placed her envelope, I disappear into the shadows of the shelving. She spots the envelope in an instant, and if the way her eyes water the longer they swing around the room is anything to go by, I’m confident she knows its significance.
I watch her in silence when she lifts the envelope off the table and presses it to her lips. Tears stream down her face when the scent I noted only seconds ago filters into her nose, but she keeps relatively calm… until her finger slides under the seal.
The longer she reads Tobias’s handwritten letter, the more her face scrunches up.
A few seconds later, a gut-wrenching sob breaks through the hand she clamped over her mouth. When the absolute grief surging through her becomes too much to bear, Tobias’s letter floats away from her body as she takes a stumbling step backward.
After crashing into the glass sliding door she rocketed through only thirty seconds ago, she slides down it until her backside meets the floor, and her cheek rests on her knee. She appears as if she wants to scream. I can see the hurt in her eyes, but she bites on her palm instead, keeping her grief hidden from the world like she’s not allowed to show her pain.
The terror on Isabelle’s face and the hollow nothingness in her eyes are almost identical to the expression Melody wore when I found her under the bed after her parents’ accident. She just lost her entire world, and there’s nothing I can do or say to prove any different.
I want to comfort her, the urge is somewhat overwhelming, but before I can, the taxi driver beeps, reminding Isabelle that even though her life may be falling apart, it’s still business as usual for everyone else.
That’s the most vexing part about grief. How quickly everyone else moves on. The same thing happened with Joey. His friends returned to their studies the week of his death, Madden was deployed a week after that, and our father didn’t even last thirty-six hours before he went back to work. It was only Mom, Phoenix, and me who were left suffering. Phoenix turned to drugs and alcohol, I turned to vengeance, and our mother spent the next six months in bed.
Melody wouldn’t have fared much better after her parents’ deaths if she weren’t required to attend school for her finals. Since giving up was never an option for her, she couldn’t stay in bed for months on end. In a way, it helped her move on from her grief, but I’ve often wondered if my push for her to live a normal, grief-free existence was the reason she cheated on me. People become complacent when they get bored. Perhaps that was what happened to Melody and me?
My thoughts shift back to the present when the cab driver’s second beep leaps Isabelle into action. She drags the sleeve of her shirt over her wrist before using it to clear away the contents spilling from her nose. Once her face is clear of tears, she stands to her feet, sucks in three big breaths to dislodge the sob in her throat,