Page 73 of The Two Last Moments

“Get me a fresh glass of water?” Nina asks. “It’ll take me a while to get this story out, and you know how my throat gets dry.”

After I get her a glass and she takes a few sips, she starts talking.

“I got the first message a few months ago. If you’ve read them, you already know what they say.Your son misses you.” She closes her eyes and flinches, as if she’s bracing against a sharp pain. “I was skeptical of course. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, and I could smell a scam a mile away. I’m not some little old lady who’s ready to send her money overseas in exchange for empty promises. But whoever is behind it, I guess they knew that Travis was my weakness. The one thing that would grab my attention. And then, they stopped writing at all. Pulled the rug out from under me. Like a cruel joke.”

Every word makes me flinch inside. I’m praying I didn’t write those messages. Please say I couldn’t be that cruel. “Maybe there’s an explanation behind it. Maybe they did know Travis and wanted to help reunite your family, but for some reason got cold feet. Or…something else stood in the way.”

“More likely, the author of the emails talked to Travis and couldn’t convince him to come and see me. Danny would say that Travis never came home because he simply doesn’t want to. I thought I’d accepted a while ago that my son was gone, but getting those messages? They broke me open again, Lark. Right down the middle.” Nina’s jaw trembles, her face shutting down the way she always does around this subject.

“You still miss him, don’t you?”

A tear slips down her cheek, and I gently wipe it away. “Of course I do. Every single day.”

When I came here and the Bradleys took me in, I was looking for my real family. I thought my biggest problem was that I couldn’t remember them. But Nina has every one of her memories, and she’sstilllost someone who belongs in her life. I hate that.

She’s afraid of the truth about Travis. And I’m freakingterrifiedof the truth about myself. What if one leads to the other? If I really have some tie to Travis Bradley, is it worth the risk of finding out? I don’t know how to make that kind of calculation. But it’s easier to be brave to help someone else, rather than just yourself.

If there’s even achanceI could help Nina find him…

“Could I see a picture of Travis?” I ask.

“What good would that do?”

“I’m curious. He’s someone you love, and that matters to me.”

She side-eyes me. “You’re plotting something. But, fine. I’m still a proud momma, even when it hurts. Hand me my iPad?” Reluctantly, she opens a window on her device. “A lot of my old photos of him weren’t digital, but I scanned them a few years ago. I keep them in a special folder.”

I flip through a slideshow of images. Nina’s husband and their two sons on road trips. Travis’s high school graduation. There are dozens of him with a baby I assume is Danny. Danny’s cute. Big eyes, wisps of pale blond hair. Chunky legs.

“Travis had always been a wanderer, much like me, but he rarely held down a steady job. He would travel around to teach at ski resorts in the winters, surfing in the summers. That was fine by me. It was the life he wanted. But Chris, his older brother, took it as a personal insult that Travis wasn’t driven by money. Then when Danny was a kid, he got so close to Travis, and that bothered Chris as well. Danny wanted to be just like his uncle.”

She flips through more photos of Danny and Travis. As he grows, Danny looks so much like his uncle, it’s uncanny. All the Bradley men are blond and blue-eyed, but Travis has the same tilt to his head as Danny when he smiles. The same gentleness to his eyes.

There’s something here in these photos, chiming in the empty spaces of my heart. Somethingbig. Hidden and shifting in the shadows inside me.

Do you still think you can run from me, Lark?

I shake away that memory. The dry scratch of the note in my hands, and the wind blowing my hair into my face.

“Why did he leave?” I ask.

“I’ve gone back and forth on that over the years. It was a small thing that blew up into something big. When my husband died suddenly, Travis didn’t make it back in time for his dad’s funeral. And when hedidshow up, he asked for money, which made his older brother furious. Travis took off in a huff. Then it turned out that my husband’s nice pair of cuff links had gone missing, something he’d worn at our wedding and left to Chris in his will. Chris accused Travis of stealing them. It got ugly fast. I always tried to stay neutral between my boys, but I was already hurt from Travis missing the funeral.”

She blinks, and another tear escapes.

“We all said shitty things. To make it worse, Danny heard a lot of the argument. He saw Travis storm off without even a goodbye. I figured, if Travis wanted to go, let him go. I didn’t think we’d never hear from him again. It took me years to realize what a mistake I’d made. I wish I’d reached out right away to say I loved him and that nothing else mattered. Especially not a pair of cuff links. But I didn’t get the chance.”

We keep scrolling through the pictures of Travis, and the feeling of recognition only intensifies. Those deep blue eyes. Not just the color, but that way Danny and his uncle both have of looking out at the world. Like they’re really seeing.

Seeingme.

It’s like the moment that I walked into Sugar & Yeast in Solvang, and I justknew.

I’ve met this man. Not just Danny, but his uncle.

What do I do with that knowledge?

“Sometimes I go months without looking at these,” Nina says. “And other times, I can’t stop. Hurts either way.”

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