Page 97 of Something Like Sunflowers

And when a community isn’t together, when people don’t build the world up for what they want to see it be, we have nothing.

Samuel had just that.

Nothing.

Except a felon father, a dead mother, and a brother who was drowning himself in grief.

I was his best hope. And I let him down.

I move my hand the final few inches it needs to trail my fingers across her knuckles, and when her eyes swipe up to mine, I lean in and kiss her, just once, before I face forward and prepare for battle.

That’s what telling this story feels like, a battle. One where nobody comes out unscathed at the end, fresh wounds opened and rubbed raw, each time the words leave my lips.

But our hands stay together, and when she squeezes once for I, twice for love, and three times for you, it feels easier to say what I need to. I’m not plagued with guilt and riddled with the fear of a grown man who’s lived and lost.

I’m a young boy, skipping along a stream, holding hands with the girl who reminds me of sunshine and makes me want to pick flowers for days, if it will only make her smile.

I want to marry this woman all over again.

I kiss her, wishing I could stop the story and lean into her, replacing the words that leave me with the taste of her sweet tongue against mine.

“I could taste you all night long,” I tell her, watching her chest turn pink in the moonlight that spills through the barn. “But you showed me your scars, and it’s time I revealed mine.”

I kiss her again, biting her bottom lip as I pull away, and she nods in understanding.

“One day, Sam was busted during a deal. He led a chase through some back roads connected to the interstate.” Devyn grips the edge of the bench, her eyes a mirror of mine, clouded with fear and sorrow. Wrapping her in my arms, I hold her tight, my chin resting atop her head as I stare forward, my own head projecting images across my mind of the night I didn’t see, but only know of because it’s fact.

There was a police report. A jury. Witnesses.

And a defendant who couldn’t possibly be my baby brother. I thought.

“He led the chase onto Garrison’s property, where his pregnant wife was working.”

Devyn’s hand curls around mine and squeezes.

“Samuel swerved, but the car behind him flipped into a shed, and the whole field went up in flames.”

“No,” Devyn gasps.

“Sam was okay,” I choke, but a sob starts at the base of my throat, hoarse and thick, the words a sticky tar, forcefully peeled from inside me.

“According to an officer who was pinned under his vehicle and later rescued, Annabelle Presley was alive, too, trapped beneath a wooden frame that splintered from the shed when it exploded.” My fingers dig into my own palm as I see it in my mind. Annabelle, beneath those wooden splinters, trapped like Devyn. And what followed…

My brother, Annabelle, flames.

I’ve gotta speak the words if I’m ever going to be free of them. To be sure they don’t wedge an even darker place between the woman I love and myself. So, I fucking do.

“Rather than save her,” I spit out, holding Devyn tighter for support, “Samuel used Annabelle’s last precious minutes to smash into his trunk and rescue six duffel bags of his precious product…one after the other after the other, until they were all laid in a neat, protected line outside the wreckage.”

I hang my head low, my voice barely a breath.

“Annabelle’s screams rang through the air.”

I loosen my hold on Devyn and exhale. My voice cracks.

“She burned alive.”

“Sammy?” she croaks through a cracked sob. “Samuel?”

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