Page 9 of Harboring Secrets
“So glamorous,” I teased as I climbed out of her car.
“Comfort is better than glamor. Call me in the morning.”
“I’ll text you.” I closed the door before she could argue with that and headed into my building. My building never used to have a doorman, but the owner had recently hired a golden retriever of a man who was sunshine personified. He greeted me with his usual sunny demeanor and welcomed me home.
I felt bad for giving him the cold shoulder. He was a nice guy, but I wasn’t in the mood for any more social interaction. My apartment was the kind of place I called home without feeling it was home. I’d moved after Piper died and most of the time I didn’t regret the decision, but sometimes it would have been nice to have ghosts to come home to.
I emptied my pockets into the porcelain dish on the side table near the door. Piper had gotten me in the habit of leaving my things by the door so they were easy to find. Not that I lost them or anything. Piper was particular about things sometimes.
Heading to my room to change, I stripped my jacket off and neatly hung the suit so it could be sent for dry cleaning. Once I was out of my suit, I slipped on a pair of lounge pants and went to the kitchen. I poured myself a gin and tonic and stared at nothing.
All day my brain had fluctuated between thinking of Piper and missing Brodie. I despised myself for what I’d done to him. I hated how I’d left things. On a lie. Unfinished. Broken. I’d hurt him because I was too cowardly to keep him. The call from Marsha had unnerved me, as calls from her often did. On the phone, Piper and Marsha sounded almost identical. It never failed to disarm me. And she’d been crying. Marsha frequently cried when I saw her or spoke to her.
If I hadn’t promised to be there long before I knew what I was promising, I might have pulled the grieving widower card and stayed away. That was a lie too. Today was the last thing I’d ever have to do for Piper and a small part of me was glad I hadn’t let her down.
I poured a second drink and drank this one slower than the first and meandered back to my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I put my drink on the nightstand and carefully picked up the two pieces of torn postcard.
Brodie’s travel journal had been postcards. One per day that he’d mail back to his brother’s house. He’d been on the road for a while, months. Traveling alone, soaking in the sights. It was strange to think that we met halfway around the world, but had we not, we never would have met at all.
I turned the pieces of the post card over and lined them up. All I had left of Brodie were the pictures in my phone that I scrolled through every night and this torn postcard. I seldom read what he wrote on his missives, but sometimes Brodie would whip one out wherever we happened to be and he’d scrawl his thoughts in the moment on the back. He was never shy about sharing them with me, but I never asked to see them. I should have asked.
I should have done a lot of things. When I met Brodie, I had no way of knowing how important he would become. How necessary his presence would feel. But wasn’t that the way of things? People never knew what they had until they didn’t have it anymore. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all. It was a saying for a reason.
But that’s not all absence did. It highlighted your mistakes. It showed you all the places you fell short. It filled your downtime with daydreams of what you might do differently if you were given another chance. And how you’d cope if you weren’t.
I’d do a lot of things differently if I were given another chance. I’d ask about the postcards. I’d show him that he was important to me. On vacation halfway around the world, Brodie had fallen in love with a version of me that I wasn’t proud of. I’d cared about Brodie, but had never told him.
At first, I thought the two of us were just some kind of fling, but when we quickly became inseparable, it was clear to me that Brodie was more than just some guy I’d met on vacation. And yet I’d taken a sledgehammer to us anyway. Influenced by guilt and grief, I’d ruined the first good thing to happen to me since Piper died. The pain in his eyes when I let him walk away haunted me at night. During the day. During any moment that I wasn’t completely occupied doing something else.
I traced my finger over the gentle slope of Brodie’s handwriting. He had stunning penmanship. When I could no longer stand to read the words, I studied the soft loops, the curves, the little happy face he drew. It was so entirely Brodie that my chest tightened just looking at it.
We’d had a great day. Shopping. Wandering the markets like boyfriends. Because that’s what we’d been like on vacation. A lot of the time we kept our PDA to a minimum, but it was always a relief when we got to a place where we could be ourselves. That’s when Brodie really sparkled.
My eyes flickered to the address label stuck to the back of the postcard. Not for the first time, I imagined going there and camping out until Brodie showed up so I could throw myself at his feet and beg his forgiveness.
What was stopping me?
The answer hit me like a brick in the face. Nothing was stopping me from going to him. Not my job or my sister or anything else. The only thing stopping me from getting up and going to him was the fear that he’d reject me.
But what if he didn’t?
I started packing.
Chapter 5
Brodie
Myone-daygraceperiodwent by entirely too fast. I still felt like roadkill, but I pasted on a smile and let Kieran smuggle me over to Mom’s house. I wasn’t shocked to see Shane’s truck when we pulled in the driveway.
“Are you sure I have to tell them I’m home?” I complained from the back seat of Kieran’s new car.
Kieran met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Yes, Brodie. You have to tell your family, the one that loves you, that you’re back in town. You can return to being a jet-lagged zombie when we get home. I’ll even let you pick the movie tonight.”
“How generous of you.” I was looking forward to seeing everyone, but I wasn’t excited about everyone seeing me. I didn’t have it in me to pretend that I was fine. Exhaustion clung to me like a second skin. I had no energy left in me to be fake-happy.
Mom’s house was home. My true north. Even now, when I’d never stayed in this particular house. It was home because she was there. I heard her in the kitchen, probably baking like she always was. Shane’s voice carried through the house. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but I took my shoes off by the door and tucked myself behind Kieran and Clay as they meandered into the kitchen.
For a brief moment, I was able to observe Mom and Shane before they saw me. Mom, of course, had flour on her apron and Shane was talking with his hands. I recognized Archer from pictures and he was the first one to spot me. He kept his mouth shut as I squeezed past Kieran and went to stand next to Mom. Unable to resist, I reached into the bowl of cookie dough she was stirring. I grabbed a little from the bowl and popped it into my mouth.
