Page 4

Chapter 4

Liam

I’d managed to make it almost all the way through the whole event without being left alone with John and Marsha. It was hard to think of them as my in-laws when Piper wasn’t here to tether us together. I missed the people they were before her death. Before, they weren’t fond of me, but after they were more brittle. Abrasive. And I had less of a reason to want to deal with them. I missed the person I used to be before her death too.

Most of all, I missed the person I was when I was with Brodie. And wasn’t that the most unfortunate, uncouth thing to realize at the grand opening of a cancer wing in honor of your dead wife? Her absence would always be a hollow spot in my heart, a hole that would never be filled. A light that would never again shine.

But Brodie was still here. Not here, but on the planet. It was shit of me to stand here and cut ribbons and talk about how brave Piper was, how hard she fought, how much this wing would have meant to her and all the good it would do for people who weren’t Piper.

“Can we talk to you about something after this?” Marsha put her hand on my arm, her manicured French tips digging into my arm through the fabric of my suit. “It’s important.”

“Marsha, I’m not sure today is the right time.” John put his arm around his wife and tugged her away from me. He pressed a kiss to her temple and shot me a sympathetic look. “Plus, we haven’t decided if that’s what we really want to do.”

“But, John,” Marsha started. Grief had torn Marsha apart at the seams and remade her without an instruction manual to follow. The result was someone who looked like Marsha, but frail. She was a carefully stacked house of cards and I didn’t want to be the one to kick that first card out from under her. But I already knew that whatever she wanted, my answer was no.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Marsha. I plan to leave after this and go straight to the airport.” A lie, but they didn’t know that.

“I only need two minutes.” Marsha pressed on, despite John’s whispered warning that now was not the time or the place. I was definitely team John. “Piper had those eggs frozen and…”

“No.” Horror slashed through me. “Absolutely not.”

Piper had desperately wanted a baby, and I’d desperately wanted Piper to be happy. But after trying the old-fashioned way and nothing worked, we’d opted to try medical intervention. Piper had just had her eggs harvested to prepare them for in vitro when she got sick. When it became clear she wasn’t going to make it, I asked her what she wanted done with the eggs.

“I can’t bear the thought of someone raising my baby, Liam. Living my life. I can’t.”

Even now her words rang in my head, shaking the way they had when she’d spoken them. Barely a whisper because she was so weak at that point. “Once I’m gone, I want them gone too.”

“We could do it now,” I’d offered, sick to my stomach from the whole conversation.

“No, Liam. Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Piper closed her eyes and that was the last we talked about it. Now, as her husband, her eggs were legally mine, as per the arrangements we’d made with the clinic and the lawyers. I should have taken care of this a long time ago, but I’d been sick with grief, nearly mad with it, and the idea of getting rid of the last little bit of her I had left hadn’t been something I was ready to grapple with.

“There, Marsha, he said no. We need to move on from this now.” John shot me a look of relief as he ushered his crumbling wife out of the room.

I needed to vomit. And then to get blindingly drunk.

Carol came swishing over to me when she spotted how John and Marsha left.

“What was that about?”

I shook my head, unwilling to spill the secrets of the grieving. I hoped that one day Marsha would be okay, but I wasn’t going to let any amount of guilt or sympathy goad me into doing something like that.

“Have I been here a socially acceptable amount of time? I would very much like to leave and get totally hammered.”

Carol’s lips twitched into a smile. “That sounds like the best idea you’ve had since you got home. Let me do the talking on our way out, and I’ll have us on our way back home to get wasted by the pool in our pajamas in less than ten minutes.”

Carol was an expert schmoozer. Her time as head of the family company had turned her into a professional escape artist. Whereas I would have gotten sucked into twelve different conversations on the way out, Carol navigated each obstacle with tact and grace and in six minutes we were in an elevator heading down to the main floor.

The familiar black Escalade pulled up and Carol climbed in first, leaving me to follow her. The silence of the car was jarring. Closing my eyes, I leaned back and pulled at my tie until the knot came loose.

“What did Marsha want?” Carol asked, determined to ferret out the truth, so I let her have it.

“I didn’t let her ask, but she wants access to Piper’s frozen eggs.” My eyes popped open and I cut Carol a careful look. “Don’t criticize her; she’s hasn’t handled this well.”

Carol’s lips flattened into a hard line. “What are you going to do with them?”

“Piper wanted them destroyed.” Even if she hadn’t, that felt like the best move, even if I hadn’t been ready to pull the trigger right away. I didn’t know if Piper’s cancer was something that could follow someone else genetically, but I’d watched what it did to her and I couldn’t bear to let that happen to someone else and their family. Even in a future that was so far removed it was impossible to picture.

John and Marsha would shit, but it wasn’t up to them to decide what to do.

“I’d forgotten about her eggs.” Carol was quiet and morose. She’d adored Piper.

“To be honest, so had I.” I let out a sigh. “All she ever wanted was a family.”

I let out an exhausted breath and cursed past me for not dealing with this sooner.

Carol patted my arm as she sighed along with me. “God, this day has been fucking awful. How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine.” I wasn’t, but not for the reason she was thinking. All day I’d been thinking of nothing but Brodie and how he could have come with me if I’d been out. If I’d have figured out how to ever tell the people around me that I was bisexual. The only person who knew now had a cancer wing named after her. Piper had embraced my bisexuality to the extent that she’d point out men she thought were cute to me.

It turns out that we had wildly different taste in men.

“The problem is,” I’d told her when she’d found it especially hysterical that we were never attracted to the same kind of men. “I’m your type, but I’m not my type.”

She’d taken my secret to her grave.

My condo came into view and I knew Carol wanted to follow me upstairs and fuss over me, but the idea of that made my skin crawl.

The vehicle came to a stop at the curb outside my building. “I think I’d like to be alone, Carol.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’m fine. Stop worrying about me.”

She looked me over and gave me a slight nod. “Fine, but you’ll check in with me tomorrow morning.”

I bit back the sassy yes, Mom that was on the tip of my tongue. “Thanks for coming with me today. I couldn’t have faced all of that alone.”

“Whatever you need, little brother. You know that. Now get out of my car. Even if we’re not getting trashed, I still very much want my pajamas and my couch.”

“So glamorous,” I teased as I climbed out of her car.

“Comfort is better than glamor. Call me in the morning.”

“I’ll text you.” I closed the door before she could argue with that and headed into my building. My building never used to have a doorman, but the owner had recently hired a golden retriever of a man who was sunshine personified. He greeted me with his usual sunny demeanor and welcomed me home.

I felt bad for giving him the cold shoulder. He was a nice guy, but I wasn’t in the mood for any more social interaction. My apartment was the kind of place I called home without feeling it was home. I’d moved after Piper died and most of the time I didn’t regret the decision, but sometimes it would have been nice to have ghosts to come home to.

I emptied my pockets into the porcelain dish on the side table near the door. Piper had gotten me in the habit of leaving my things by the door so they were easy to find. Not that I lost them or anything. Piper was particular about things sometimes.

Heading to my room to change, I stripped my jacket off and neatly hung the suit so it could be sent for dry cleaning. Once I was out of my suit, I slipped on a pair of lounge pants and went to the kitchen. I poured myself a gin and tonic and stared at nothing.

All day my brain had fluctuated between thinking of Piper and missing Brodie. I despised myself for what I’d done to him. I hated how I’d left things. On a lie. Unfinished. Broken. I’d hurt him because I was too cowardly to keep him. The call from Marsha had unnerved me, as calls from her often did. On the phone, Piper and Marsha sounded almost identical. It never failed to disarm me. And she’d been crying. Marsha frequently cried when I saw her or spoke to her.

If I hadn’t promised to be there long before I knew what I was promising, I might have pulled the grieving widower card and stayed away. That was a lie too. Today was the last thing I’d ever have to do for Piper and a small part of me was glad I hadn’t let her down.

I poured a second drink and drank this one slower than the first and meandered back to my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I put my drink on the nightstand and carefully picked up the two pieces of torn postcard.

Brodie’s travel journal had been postcards. One per day that he’d mail back to his brother’s house. He’d been on the road for a while, months. Traveling alone, soaking in the sights. It was strange to think that we met halfway around the world, but had we not, we never would have met at all.

I turned the pieces of the post card over and lined them up. All I had left of Brodie were the pictures in my phone that I scrolled through every night and this torn postcard. I seldom read what he wrote on his missives, but sometimes Brodie would whip one out wherever we happened to be and he’d scrawl his thoughts in the moment on the back. He was never shy about sharing them with me, but I never asked to see them. I should have asked.

I should have done a lot of things. When I met Brodie, I had no way of knowing how important he would become. How necessary his presence would feel. But wasn’t that the way of things? People never knew what they had until they didn’t have it anymore. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all. It was a saying for a reason.

But that’s not all absence did. It highlighted your mistakes. It showed you all the places you fell short. It filled your downtime with daydreams of what you might do differently if you were given another chance. And how you’d cope if you weren’t.

I’d do a lot of things differently if I were given another chance. I’d ask about the postcards. I’d show him that he was important to me. On vacation halfway around the world, Brodie had fallen in love with a version of me that I wasn’t proud of. I’d cared about Brodie, but had never told him.

At first, I thought the two of us were just some kind of fling, but when we quickly became inseparable, it was clear to me that Brodie was more than just some guy I’d met on vacation. And yet I’d taken a sledgehammer to us anyway. Influenced by guilt and grief, I’d ruined the first good thing to happen to me since Piper died. The pain in his eyes when I let him walk away haunted me at night. During the day. During any moment that I wasn’t completely occupied doing something else.

I traced my finger over the gentle slope of Brodie’s handwriting. He had stunning penmanship. When I could no longer stand to read the words, I studied the soft loops, the curves, the little happy face he drew. It was so entirely Brodie that my chest tightened just looking at it.

We’d had a great day. Shopping. Wandering the markets like boyfriends. Because that’s what we’d been like on vacation. A lot of the time we kept our PDA to a minimum, but it was always a relief when we got to a place where we could be ourselves. That’s when Brodie really sparkled.

My eyes flickered to the address label stuck to the back of the postcard. Not for the first time, I imagined going there and camping out until Brodie showed up so I could throw myself at his feet and beg his forgiveness.

What was stopping me?

The answer hit me like a brick in the face. Nothing was stopping me from going to him. Not my job or my sister or anything else. The only thing stopping me from getting up and going to him was the fear that he’d reject me.

But what if he didn’t?

I started packing.