Page 44 of Tin

“Miranda took all the furniture when she moved out. According to the divorce agreement, she was only allowed to take her personal items upon her departure. I’m guessing she and the judge had vastly different ideas about what constitutes a personal item. Regardless, I didn’t give a shit about any of it, so I let her.” He continues through the empty space and rounds the corner into a large living room spanning the entire side of the house and matched in size by a balcony visible through the wall of windows and glass doors.

Miranda. His wife. Why do those three words make me want to throw up?

“How long were you two married?” I ask. Because if we’re doing this, we’re really doing this. And I’m going to need to know. All of it. Otherwise, I’ll just make up my own shit to fill in the blanks, and that’s got bad news written all over it.

“Five years. Well, would have been that year, anyway.” He stops in front of one of the glass doors and gazes out at the ocean. “We got married right after I graduated college. We’d been seeing each other off and on for a few months when she found out she was pregnant.” He turns toward me. “At first I just figured we’d work things out as we went. I mean, I wasn’t worried about finances, and even though I hadn’t been planning on it at that particular time in my life, I wanted to be a dad, so it was easy to accept the news as good. But Miranda was in a panic about the whole thing. Said her father would disown her if she had a baby out of wedlock and that not getting married was not an option.”

I get it. Miranda was a controlling, manipulative, whiny bitch and I already hate her ass. Of course, my opinion might be slightly tainted. “And what? You were like, that’s cool. Fuck it. Let’s get married?”

He chuckles. I think I actually surprised him this time. “Yeah. Something like that. I was barely twenty-two. What did I know? My parents got married at nineteen. Had Hannah a year later. The concept wasn’t completely foreign to me.”

We’re having one of those awkward reality moments where he’s old and implying I’m an ignorant kid without realizing it. So I remind him. “I’m twenty-two.”

He shakes his head at me. “Only in this lifetime.”

Fair enough.

Apparently feeling that he’s answered my question about his marriage sufficiently, he begins to move again. When we turn the corner once more, there’s some sort of family room. At least, the main wall is covered in family pictures, so whatever was in here wasn’t a movie room. That one I can rule out. There’s no wall space left for the screen.

It takes me a second before I realize this is the part of the house I stumbled upon that night in the stairwell on my way to the deck. Even though most of the frames are still intact and on the wall, several more are in pieces on the floor.

“What happened in here?” My voice is barely audible. Mostly because I’m a little scared to ask.

“Me.” It’s a straightforward answer, and he bends down to pick up the frame at his feet. “Just couldn’t take it, you know? First my dad and sister die in that crash. Then my grandfather. It was already taking all I had to try and take care of the business by myself, not to mention Sid.” He’s staring down at the picture in his hands, but I don’t think it’s really what he sees. His voice sounds like he’s ages away. Back when everything first happened. “The irony was priceless, really. Hannah and Sid putting off their wedding all those years in hopes that my mother would come around and attend the wedding.”

“Your mom wasn’t going to go to their wedding?” My parents hated Jackson. But they still would have shown up if I had decided to marry him.

“My mom hadn’t spoken to Hannah in nearly seven years. Not since the day she told her she was engaged to another woman. My sister never gave up, though. Every Saturday morning, she would call her and leave a lengthy voicemail pretending they were having the same weekly chats they’d had all her life before my mother found out her daughter was a lesbian.” The disdain is abundant in his voice. “You know, if my parents hadn’t already been divorced, I think my father would have left my mother right then and there. Didn’t matter, though. She was already gone. Already living in New Hampshire with her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend.

“Anyway, after the accident, my mother finally deemed my sister worthy of a visit. Even if it was just to attend her funeral. Honestly, I think Hannah would have preferred she’d just stayed away. She did nothing but make everything harder on everyone else. Especially Sid.Then, after my mother found out Sid was set to inherit Hannah’s trust and the shares she owned in the company, things only got worse. My mother flipped. Hired a lawyer. Tried everything she could to get my sister’s will deemed invalid. Didn’t work, of course, but I still had to take the time to go to court and make sure it didn’t. Sid was a mess. And she didn’t care about the money, so she was ready to just sign whatever my mother wanted her to. But Hannah would never have been okay with that.”

When the silence starts to rest in the air, I gently squeeze his hand. “You’re a good brother, Riker. A good man.”

He turns, and I’m shocked by what I see. The beast of his grief has been completely unleashed, tearing him apart from the inside out. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Except continue to coax it out and set it free.

“What part did Miranda play in all of this?”

His gaze drops down to the frame again. “What part? I don’t know. The villain, maybe? No, that was my mother. Evil cheating bitch, I guess.”

“So that’s why you two split? She had an affair?” He’s still not looking at me, but I’m not taking my eyes off of him.

“That was part of it. Yeah. Not the worst part. But definitely a deciding factor.” His gaze is still glued to the frame in his hands, and a tear drops down onto the glass. His heart is breaking all over again. Maybe he hadn’t loved her when they first got married, but five years is a long time. Feelings change. Evolve. Clearly, he was devastated when his marriage fell apart. “After everything else that had already happened that year...”

“I get it. Then you lost her and it broke you,” I whisper, trying my best to hide my own hurt. This isn’t about me.

“It wasn’t losing her that broke me.” He hands me the frame he’s been holding this whole time and starts to walk away.

Automatically, my view drops from the back of his shoulder blades to the picture in my hands. Two small faces are smiling up at me through shattered glass. A little girl with white, blonde curls and a little boy with the biggest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. This wasn’t ever about her. It was about them.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

RIKER

Of all the rooms in this godforsaken house, this is the only one Miranda left fully furnished. I haven’t stood inside these four walls since the day I came home from the hospital and realized this room would never be lived in by the baby we’d both spent the last seven months waiting for.

I remember sitting in that rocking chair in the corner. The same one we’d had in Harlow’s nursery and then again in Mason’s. I’d spent countless nights in that rocker, swaying back and forth when Harlow was teething. And then again with Mason when he refused to sleep in his crib for more than thirty minutes at a time.

I brought the rocking chair into this room right after I’d finished painting the walls. Teal. Miranda’s request. The rocker was the first piece of furniture in the room, and I placed it right beside the window, imagining the nights I would sit in it again, gazing out at the stars and giving the newest member of our family his or her first astronomy lessons.

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