Page 93 of Something Like Sunflowers

I deposit Garrison’s limp body on the sofa next to a picture of Annabelle, a beautiful woman with brown hair and the voice of an angel. When she’d sing at church, Gary couldn’t look away, always braggin’ to the rest of us that her voice is as good as her cookin’, and her cookin’ is as good as her lookin’. They were so in love, they’d barely popped out the first kid before she was carrying their next.

Samuel’s my younger brother. I think I’ll always feel a sense of responsibility for the things he did that plague so many, because no matter what you do in the present to right it, the past is always the past.

And the dead don’t return.

I make sure there are no candles burning before we turn out the lights and go home.

Chapter 35

Hunter

One thing about Devyn is you know when she’s pissed.

And right now, she is really fuckin’ pissed. At me.

“I’m sorry.” I grip the steering wheel tighter. “I shouldn’t have blamed you for what happened back there. I just…there’re things I haven’t told you about yet, and I—”

Devyn whips her neck to face me, nothing but narrow slits where her bright round eyes usually appear, and she cuts me off with that look alone. The words she says after sting, but the look on her face when she says them is heartbreaking. I’ve wounded her. I’ve betrayed some of the trust we’ve carefully built back up.

And I watch as she painstakingly slides those concrete slabs back in place, the invisible ones she wedges between us when it’s too much to face skin to skin. The ones she thinks I can’t see plain as day.

I see you, babygirl. I’ve always seen you.

“You blamed me. Do you know how bad that hurts?” She grits her teeth to get the message out, but it’s her eyes I’m still stuck on, the shining orbs that are so close to spilling over, I might see it again this time. Two times in one night I will have made her cry. I’ve fucked up.

“You don’t understand what power Garrison holds in this town, Dev,” I whisper, checking the rearview mirror to see Jonathan staring out the window. I don’t want him to hear me talk about his dad. A conversation like this one is better off happening later. At home. Even if Devyn doesn’t understand that.

“Can we talk about this when we’re home?”

“Your home, you mean?”

Her words slice me open. I’ve come to think of it as our home. Of her as my girl.

Of us as a family.

“It’s our home. And I was wrong to make you feel anything to the contrary.” I hope she can read my eyes the same way I can hers.

Do you see me? I beg her with my stare.

“This isn’t the first time these two have had problems, and Ellie is one strike away from getting in serious trouble for it. I panicked when I saw you brought the evidence of their fight right to the very person who could act against her.”

“All I was trying to do was help her out of something she got herself into when nobody else was there to do it, Hunter. She was hurt. And scared. Hell, they’d already made up by the time I got there. We were just taking Jonathan and the cow back home when we found Garrison.”

I grab her hand and cock my head slightly toward Jonathan behind us, and Dev gets the message. She stops, maneuvering her words away from Jonathan’s living demons.

But she’s still my girl. Tough and unrelenting. So, she gives it to me all the same.

“You haven’t even asked about the cow.” This part is loud enough for the kids to hear.

“What the hell’s the damn cow got to do with this?” I ask, earning twin groans from the back seat and a look of pure outrage from Devyn.

“You know what?” she says, threading her hands through her hair and facing forward again. Away from me.

I don’t like it.

“I’ve been assaulted, frightened, and blamed enough for one night,” she drops her voice to a whisper, “but what I’m madder about is that little girl back there, she needed me, and I tried to do the right thing in your absence, but what you seem to be implying is that I should have stayed out of it. No matter how close we’ve grown, no matter that the whole town thinks we’re one big married happy family and you’ve asked both Ellie and me to go along with this. But it’s not my business, right? Because she’s not my kid? And by those standards, Hunter Isaac, this isn’t our home…it’s yours. I’m just a part of it you made some space for.”

My heart breaks the way they say it does in all those books she reads. It’s not a metaphor. I feel it, the tense pain between each crack that splinters through my chest at the thought of her not belonging right here with me. With us.

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