Page 121 of Sunburned

Otherwise, their lives are not terribly different, except for the additional time I have with them since I’ve added three more agents and two assistants to my company, and the man who is often in our house. If things continue as they are, Laurent and I will likely buy a home of a more comfortable size for the four of us sometime in the future, closer to the beach where we surf. But there’s no rush.

“I ask you to bow your heads for a moment of silent reflection as we remember Tyson Dale,” the minister says, handing the urn to Samira.

I think of Tyson, the boy with big dreams who I’d been so smitten with in high school, the young man desperate to prove himself who’d broken my heart, and the billionaire who’d changed the world for the better but carried such darkness in his soul.

It’s poetic justice, really, the corrosive nature of the knowledge that he didn’t do the one thing that brought him notoriety and success. His deception became a cancerous tumor, crowding out all the light in him, withering his self-confidence and fueling the fire of his insecurity, which raged until his heart was charred.

Samira’s black maxidress billows around her as she walks to the edge of the bluff, where she reaches into the urn and casts a handful of ashes into the fading evening sky.

Some have called Tyson’s death at Cody’s hand fate, some karma; but if that’s true, it was a fate they authored by their actions, a karma of their own design. Both brothers made the choices that defined them, as did I, as do all of us.

The ashes scatter on the breeze, whisked over the canyon by the wind. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the minister says.

The days between? Well, I suppose we are condemned to be free.