Page 41 of Beautiful Broken Love

From: Davina Klein-Roberts

To: Deke Bishop

Oh. Yeah, I get it. It does hurt but I think I’ll be okay.

From: Deke Bishop

To: Davina Klein-Roberts

No you won’t. No one is ever fine after.

From: Davina Klein-Roberts

To: Deke Bishop

What do you mean?

TWENTY-ONE

DAVINA

I flipped onto my stomach with my phone in my face, waiting for Deke to respond. What did he mean,No one is fine after?

While I waited for him to email me back, I searched his name on the internet. Many articles popped up—waytoo many to count.

Most of them were stats. Some were with BOBBLE, a popular source for celebrity gossip. They had pictures of him with that Giselle Grace woman from two months ago.

I ignored the BOBBLE stuff and typed Deke’s name in the search bar again but this time with the wordgrieving. With that, not many options popped up. Two appeared but were from four years ago, when a team he used to play for lost a playoff game. There was also a Facebook post with a picture attached to it that the search engine considered a related link.

I gave it a click, and it led me to an image of a boy with russet skin, cornrows, light-brown eyes, and a big smile. He wore a dark-green basketball jersey with the number two on it and had a basketball tucked beneath his arm. The post was made by a woman named Olivia Blake. The caption said:

Damon. Light of my life. Sweet, sweet angel. It’s been 3 years too many and our grief has only started healing. Mom, Camille, Whitney, and Deke love and miss you so much. RIH, baby.

“Oh my goodness.”

This was his mom’s Facebook page. There was a carousel of images along with the photo of Damon—some of him with his sisters and with his mom, but then a picture appeared of him and a teenage Deke.

Deke was smiling from ear to ear with his brother, their faces so close to the camera I almost couldn’t distinguish them. But I knew those eyes. I’d become very familiar with them. It was an adorable picture.

Wholesome.

Sweet.

But the sight of it broke my heart.

Deke’s brother had died, which meant I was right. Hedidknow grief. That glimpse of brokenness I saw during our little intermission at the party was because he no longer had his brother.

I swiped off the internet and sat in the dark for a moment, letting it sink in. Deke still hadn’t emailed me back, and with so much time passing, he either had fallen asleep or was purposely not answering because he didn’t want to talk about it.

I figured it was the latter, so I went back to our emails and wrote up a new one.

From: Davina Klein-Roberts

To: Deke Bishop

You know ... I was completely fine during the party and just knew I wouldn’t cry about anything. I was distracted, I had my food, I had my drinks, I had myfriends ... but there was something about being on that stage that changed it all.

I looked around the room and saw all those faces. I was searching for something—well someone. And it hit me all over again that my husband wasn’t there and that he’ll never be here again. But his face was all I wanted to see.

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