Page 72 of Born in the Spring

Then her features soften as she rubs the place she just squeezed. “What’s going on up there?” She nods at my head and it shakes.

“This is. . .” I begin, then begin again, finishing lowly. “This is where I last saw Shepherd.”

Something in my mind opens up as I say those words aloud, the dulled sear in my chest flaring.

His loss will never not burn.Thatwill never be okay.

My eyes look over each face that passes me, none of them him. But none of them would be.

But he was here. And I was here with him. Until we were both gone.

My next inhale feels like I’m breathing through smoke, and I drag as much cold air into my lungs as I can, overwhelmed by the complete picture of what happened here as my head rekindles every minute.

I knew the time would come when I wouldn’t be able to tuck it away again.

I can’t anymore. I shouldn’t.

But I need. . .

I need some help.

Help I can’t get while watching over someone else’s child.

But my day with Skylar is almost over, so I hold a steadying grip around the top of the railing and tough this out as my eyes track him around the rink.

“Hey. . .” Vanessa’s tone is hesitant as she tries to get myattention, but when I don’t give her mine again, she becomes the friend I need her to be right now, keeping a comforting hand on my arm and her own pressure off my heart.

She does tell me she’ll be coming by tonight once we’re separating, but by then, I hopefully won’t have to withdraw from her nudging.

After I make sure Skylar is safe and back with his dad, my body moving but my mind in a standstill on that rink seven months ago, I escape back to Shepherd’s lodge.

The space doesn’t have the same emptiness it did when I walked in after six months, but I have the same feelings. A shiver passes through me as I remove my jacket. My heart clenches as I remove my phone from a pocket. My breath catches and stalls in my lungs as I drop down onto the couch.

Then I’m sighing into the cushions, my lungs and my heart forgiving as the first ring touches my ear.

“Elara?” There’s concern in Helena’s voice, but not surprise, as she answers on the fourth ring.

“Can you take a call?”

There’s rustling on her end of the line, the sound of shifting around her evening just for me, knowing what call this is. “Sure can.”

My smile is small as I swallow through the welling in my throat, then tell her what she’s been expecting to hear.

“I need to talk about that night.”

And so I talk. I give away every thought and feeling I’ve muted from every moment before the ice, then on the ice, then off the ice, that I barely confronted then, so I can better confront them now.

Thirty

Jasper

Ifelt off when I woke up this morning—even more so than I do when I wake up in my bed alone instead of on my couch with Elara—and after making my rounds and walking into the main lodge, I find out why.

The sight of my father’s head jolts me to a stop. He’s turned to the tree, his hands inside the pockets of a long jacket, still as tense as he was when he left, from the protruding points of his elbows, cinching tension into me.

He is showing his face. Daysafterhe served Mom those divorce papers.

And he’s being a skulker, creeping onto the mountain, smart enough to know he won’t be welcomed in, but selfish enough to only care that he’s seen.

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