Page 59 of Fight for Me
I love how nature is never silent. I never feel alone when I’m out here.
The music that had been roaring in the background has faded to a muted hum. I don’t know where he went, it’s hundreds of acres between his farm and mine, and he could be anywhere, but I keep walking.
I take a deep breath and focus, trying to feel more than think.
After another fifteen minutes of letting my heart lead my steps, I see him.
Declan’s back is to me, and his chin is down to his chest as though he’s praying. I make my way there, knowing this could backfire but also believing in my heart that being alone isn’t what he needs right now.
He stiffens, and I continue forward.
“You shouldn’t have followed me.” His voice is low, and he doesn’t turn.
“You shouldn’t have left.”
I hear the breath release through his nose as I come to a stop beside him.
This place means something to all the brothers. It’s where their mother rests.
“Did you make sure this place was taken care of for her?”
I shake my head. While I made it a point to come out and check on the sights, my care was never needed. “No, I never had to. Your father took care of it after you all left.”
We both fall silent. There were so many nights I met Declan out here as he dealt with his loss. So many times he wanted the solace of being close to the woman who loved him with her whole heart. She was why he fought for his brothers. The promises he made her as she died were what fueled him to take blow after blow from his father.
As much as the abandonment I felt from my own father hurt, I couldn’t imagine what he endured.
To face his father and know it would end in bruises and cruelness no one deserved broke my heart as a kid as much as it breaks my heart as an adult.
I would do anything to go back in time and do something to save him. I kept his secrets after he begged me to. He was so sure they’d take him and his brothers away, separate them, and that would’ve been more than he could bear. I never knew if I did the right thing, but then, the idea of losing him was enough to make mewantto stay quiet, and for what?
It broke him, and it destroyed us.
I failed him, and I lost us.
Declan lifts his head to the sky and then finally speaks. “He loved her.”
“He did.”
His father, for all his faults, never let Elizabeth Arrowood’s final resting place crumble. Each time I came, thinking it might be overgrown, it wasn’t. The headstone is black with her name etched in white as though time stood still here. No matter how many years passed, this little patch of Arrowood land has been maintained. The grass was always cut, and the flowers were rotated based on the season.
In the eight years of their absence, this was the only place he took care of.
“Did you come out often to check?”
“Yes. I knew that even with you gone, you’d want her cared for.”
I close my eyes, remembering how he would drag the push mower from my home to this spot. It’s equal distance from both our farms, but he kept it at my barn so his father could never take it from him as a punishment.
We’d walk out here, and it would take him hours to ensure that everything was just right.
“She loved him too,” Declan says after a moment.
She loved everyone. There wasn’t a soul that Elizabeth met that she didn’t find the goodness in. Her heart was ten times too big for her body and was the epitome of what people should strive to be like.
However, nothing came close to the love she had for her boys. No matter what, they came first. She fought through whatever she needed to in order to keep them safe, and everyone admired her for it.
When she fell sick, it was as though the angels wept.
