Page 86 of Settling the Score

‘What it’s like to meet the one person you just know you need in your life. I’m not saying I couldn’t live without Astrid. I’m just saying, I wouldn’t want to. It’s like, before I met her, I was running at maybe 40 per cent capacity. I wasn’t… unlocked.’

Aiden threw his brother a quizzical look. ‘Careful, bro. You sound kinda New Age.’

‘I’m turning over a whole new leaf.’

‘Yeah, I can see that,’ Aiden said, serious again.

‘You’ll meet someone one day, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about,’ Blake promised, with all the smug indulgence of someone who secretly believed that they alone had found true love, and no one else would ever really know the sublime, soaring heights of their happiness.

Aiden grunted, turned back to the view of the water, sipped his drink. Tried not to listen to his thumping, irritated heart. The same heart that had been shouting at him all day to stop being such an ass and wake the hell up.

‘Unless you already have,’ Blake inserted, a little too innocently to be without forethought.

Aiden threw him a glance then looked away.

Blake sighed. ‘You’re not gonna talk about it?’

‘Talk about what?’

‘The fact you’re clearly as in love with Sienna as you were as a kid.’

Aiden bristled. His heart rejoiced. He continued to ignore it. But his stomach rolled and clenched and his eyes filled with stars and visions of a future he’d already discounted as impossible. A rosy future with a big old house, white picket fence and a town that he was single-handedly saving from desperation. The good he could do, with Sienna by his side…

‘Come on, man. I’ve got eyes,’ Blake continued.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t know what to say to that.’

‘Why can’t you just face it?’

Aiden sat a little straighter. His temples pounded. His certainty on the beach that afternoon that he couldn’t let things go with Sienna again slammed into him, but he wasn’t ready to admit it yet. It was terrifying. Too big. Too huge. Like a black hole of what ifs. ‘You really have to ask me that?’

Blake made a noise. A groan. A sigh. All mixed in one. Then, he laughed. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What?’ Aiden couldn’t quite keep the defensive note from his voice.

Blake visibly sobered. ‘Ice is running scared.’

Aiden’s spine couldn’t have gone any straighter if he’d had a hockey stick pressed to it. He opened his mouth to deny it, but the words died before he could find them, because his brother was right.

‘Holy shit, man. You’re scared. You’re scared like you’ve always been, that you’re going to morph into him.’

Aiden turned to him quickly. ‘What?’

‘You told me. Once. Years ago. I remember, because it was like the most patently absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life.Yoube likeDad? Me, yes, but not you.’

Aiden bristled. His voice though was perfectly calm. ‘Just because I don’t show what I’m feeling like you do, doesn’t mean I don’t still feel it.’

Blake’s jaw squared. ‘Feeling things isn’t the problem,’ Blake muttered. ‘Feeling things is normal. Healthy. It’s what you do with those feelings that matters. Dad never got that. He never learned to regulate. To take himself for a run or, I don’t know, get a punching bag in the backyard, or a really good shrink.’

Aiden squeezed the beer bottle tighter. ‘But he loved Mom.’

‘So?’

‘So how do you know, I mean, you love Astrid, but how do youknow…’

‘Because I’m not him. And you’re not him either. That kind of violence, it’s not genetic. It’s not hard-wired into us. If anything, seeing what he was like, knowing what it’s like to live with that fear, it’s made us both the total opposite of him. I know when I’m getting pissed off. I feel it. Like a hum in my ears, and I know what to do, how to deal with it. Most of all, I know I would never, ever hurt Astrid, or anyone else. We’re not him.’

Aiden dropped his head, staring at the ground between his feet, his breath burning as it tried to whoosh from his lungs. It was like being winded, or puffed out. He could hardly think straight. Sienna had said the same thing, but he hadn’t believed her.