Page 97 of The Night We Lost Him

“Take it. Clearly you think I’m hiding something, so take it. Look through the whole thing. See for yourself.”

He starts to hand me the phone, but I wave him off. I have no intention of opening it now. I don’t want to see what my father was trying to hold on to for just him. And for her.

But Sam, apparently, feels differently. He drills me with a look and takes our father’s phone out of Joe’s hand.

“I’ll take that, thank you.”

I look down at the phone in Sam’s hands, at that screensaver, that photo of Windbreak staring back at me.

“I’m going to try and put aside how insulting it is that you think I could ever hurt your father,” Joe says. “I know better than anyone how easy it is to confuse grief for guilt.”

I look back up at Joe, those words penetrating. Confusing grief for guilt. He isn’t wrong. It was easy to think that Uncle Joe was guilty of something, to misread his behavior as suspicious—to misread his sadness as remorse.

And when you are grieving, guilt lives inside your sadness, doesn’t it? The guilt lives there like an unfortunate side effect of what you haven’t done. You haven’t saved who matters most.

“But you believe this too?” Joe says. “That something happened that night?”

I meet his eyes, a new clarity coming to me.

“I do,” I say.

And it’s true. The whole pattern is gnawing at me, moving closer to me. My father’s own words coming back to me. Our first night at Windbreak together, on that cliff together. Windbreak doesn’t just belong to me. Which is when I get there.

“Joe, how about Windbreak?” I say. “Was he going to leave that to her too originally? To Grace?”

He nods. “A long time ago. But, for as far back as I remember, it was always going to you.”

“Why?”

“Grace didn’t like to be there without him any more than he liked being there without her.” He shrugs. “And your father knew anyone else would sell it. Figured you wouldn’t. Figured that maybe you would know what to do with it. How to build something as beautiful as that land is.”

“He told you that?”

“He did. He told me that.”

I nod, a memory floating back in. That conversation with my father, one of our last, when he wanted me to come with him to Windbreak, when he’d asked for my opinion on renovating the property. I’m looking to make some changes. Now I knew why he suddenly wanted my opinion—he wanted me to be invested in Windbreak, to start thinking of it as mine. Because that had been his place with Grace. And now that Grace wasn’t there, Windbreak mattered less too.

It catches me all at once, the breadth of it, what I’ve needed to know. And everything clicks into place. The clues now connected, weaving together in their intricate layers, circling their unifying force. Grace.

Grace, Cory. My father’s before, and his after. The person he most wanted with him at Windbreak. The only person he ever wanted to be with. How reductive and yet how true. As if he is the only one to get to claim that.

That’s when I realize there is someone else, someone who also wanted to claim that. To claim that what they built was the love that counted more. Because just as you can confuse someone’s grief for guilt, you can do the opposite.

You can think their guilt is grief.

That’s what I saw on someone else’s face, isn’t it? It was guilt. He felt guilty for what he’d wanted.

He felt guilty for where it led him.

To the last place he should have been.

The edge of a cliff.

A cliff and a love and a final goodbye, which, despite the ring still on his finger, still didn’t get to be his.

I turn to my brother. “I know who was there that night.”

Five Years Ago