Page 66 of The Candlemaker

After a beat of silence, she spoke again. “Does she always think you…”

My jaw flexed. “Are my father?”

“Yeah.”

“Not always,” I said, suddenly finding it hard to get the words out. “Some days, she thinks I’m a younger version of myself. Still in college. On her bad days, I’m my father.” Something broke inside my chest, and the weight resting on it carried out on my heavy exhale. “Or maybe I’m the reason for her bad days because I remind her of him.”

I could claim it was work that kept me from visiting or even the pain of being mistaken for my father, but this was the truth. What if seeing me worsened her condition? What if the way it upset her—made her angry—made everything worse? After today, what the hell was I supposed to think? She almosthad to be sedated, and it was because of me—because of seeing me.

“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Frankie lifted her chin as she said it like she was a damn expert on the subject.

“How do you know?”

“Because of the way she talked about you and the way she looked when she did it,” Frankie said, and the way she looked at me… “For so long, we tried to bring my brother, Kit, out of his darkness in ways that made sense to us. We’d do the same things we used to. We’d have the same meals. Watch the same movies. Visit the same places. We thought reminding him of all the good in his life before would help him.”

“But it made it worse.” Because that was how it fucking felt every time Mom looked at me and saw him. The man who hurt her. Used her. Left her. Abandoned us.

“No,” she said with a little sigh. “It was like we were trying to open a locked door with the wrong key. We didn’t make the door more… locked; we didn’t make it worse. We just didn’t have the right way to reach him. But it didn’t change that we were there, waiting on the other side of the door for him to come through it.”

“And if she never comes through it again?” I rasped, bitterness leaching into my tone from where it welled inside me. “Wouldn’t it be better for me to stay away? To never see her, so she’s never reminded of him? To not risk causing her pain?”

Her breath caught as though my pain had reached out and grabbed her by the throat. The color of her eyes darkened, but they also flickered with light. Twin flames that burned with emotion.

“How do you think she would feel on the days she does remember? On the days she is lucid and wonders where her son is? Why he doesn’t see her? What if she does peek through that door just a little bit?”

In an instant, all that bitterness transformed into something else. Something stronger but lighter. Something that filled my chest and fluttered, the cocooned bitterness transforming into something completely different.

“There’s going to come a time when she has no memory, only moments,” she continued, her voice turning breathless. “After that, a time when you will have no more moments, only memories…but only if you decide to keep making them.”

The words landed like a pin in the cogs of time, stopping everything with the simplest, subtlest suggestion. To be there. To be present. My gaze caught like kindling in her stare. My pulse thumped heavily on the side of my neck up to where her palm rested on my cheek.

She was right. What she said was right. How she felt was right. But it was more than all of that; it was everything about her that was right…for me.

And there was going to come a time when I would have no more moments with her if I didn’t do something about it now.

I cupped her face, the touch like a lever that parted her mouth. my thumb skimming the soft skin of her cheek.“Because a light isn’t the only way out of the darkness.”

Her breath hitched, her full lips parting like an invitation. “Exactly.”

I wanted to kiss her again. Hell, I wanted to kiss her at every moment, and I wasn’t going to waste any more of them.

My head dipped, a growl reaching from my chest—reaching for her. And then a boom of thunder reverberated so loudly it shook the entire cabin. Jars clanked and rattled. And it was only her quick lunge that stopped a precariously stacked beaker from toppling off the counter.

“Crap.” She steadied it and said softly, “We should get going. If we leave now, we can probably pick up food and make it back to the inn before the rain hits.”

“Okay.”

Our eyes met. There was a powerful storm brewing. And it had nothing to do with thunder or rain or lightning and everything to do with my little candlemaker and the fire she’d started inside me.

Chapter Sixteen

Frankie

I really neededto stop kissing Chandler. Or almost kissing him. Or thinking about kissing him. But the way I wanted to was like a hold around my throat, siphoning off more and more oxygen the longer I was around him.

“Well, at least we’re already prepared for the storm,” I said loudly, rushing by Chandler as soon as he unlocked the inn’s front door.

The weather had gone from ominous to torrential in the stretch between the sandwich shop where we’d quickly scarfed down dinner and the old building, the rain spilling from the sky like a broken faucet. I’d been the one who suggested we walk. After that moment in the shop, with his hands framing my face and the hungry tangle of his stare in mine, there was no way I could get back in the car with him. The closed space. The heavy silence. I couldn’t do it. I needed space. A minute to breathe.

---