Page 40 of His Christmas Star
“You still have it?”
“That’s weird, right? I’ve kept it in the bottom of a bin for years. I couldn’t part with it.”
“I didn’t say it was weird. Why do you have it out here tonight?”
I turned to him, holding up the harness. “A forum that I used to post on for families who had loved ones die of hunting accidents sent me an email. Well, they forwarded me an email from a guy who had seen one of my posts.”
“How long ago are we talking?”
“Probably ten years. I haven’t been on forums since college. I posted there a lot because they understood my pain and anger about the accident.”
He slid his hand up my face to cup my cheek. “You don’t have to defend yourself. I understand. What did the email say?”
“It sent me to another forum where people were discussing a class-action lawsuit against a harness manufacturer.”
“The same one as Cody’s?”
I nodded, swallowing around the lump in my throat. “Jo-Jo, I haven’t been active on those forums in at least eight years, and then out of the blue, I get an email from them?”
“Just four days after Daddy Nash left us.”
“He kept his promise, Joe,” I said, my voice choked full of pain, regret, and fear. “He found Cody.”
He wrapped his arms around me and held me, tenderly kissing the top of my head. “I sure hope he did, sweetheart. Did the harness match up with what you read on the forum?”
The tears ran down my cheeks as I held it up. “I can’t bring myself to look.”
He took it from my hand but never broke eye contact with me. “Tell me what to look for, and I’ll check.”
“The—the bungee cord on the back and the front clip.”
“Okay, what am I looking for?”
“The lawsuit claims that the bungee cord loses elasticity, and when it gets a hard yank, it either breaks or stretches out and never recoils. If the user is thrown forward in a fall, the chest clip will snap, and the user can fall out of the harness.”
“Kind of like the way we found Cody?” he asked, realization dawning.
I nodded, my lips trembling as I motioned at the harness. “Okay, look at it.”
“I don’t need to. I can already see that the bungee isn’t coiled.”
I gasped and had to let out a sob before I could speak. “What about the buckle.”
He glanced down at it for a moment and then lowered it to the stair. “The top half of the buckle ridge is snapped off. I had assumed that the deputy who found him had just opened it to get him out. I never looked at the harness again after we bagged it.”
“Joe,” I cried, my body quivering with all the years of pent-up fear, anxiety, pain, and loss. “I had the answer all along. Oh my God, what have I done?”
“You haven’t done anything, Tobi. You didn’t know about the harness.”
“What have I done?” I asked again before I fell into him and sobbed. A chasm filled with twelve years of grief and pain opened below me, and I fell in, finally swallowed by the swirling monster that had always waited for me at the bottom.
Chapter Eleven
I held Tobi for an hour until her sobs quieted and she had found even ground again. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, but for now, she was calm. My world had tipped sideways when she told me about the class-action lawsuit. All these years we’d spent blaming each other, blaming ourselves, and hating ourselves without knowing the answer was right in front of us.
I convinced her to take a warm shower before bed, and she was finally sleeping, but I couldn’t. Not after holding her as she sobbed in my arms, her words not making sense, but the emotions were honest and pure. I had never felt more impotent in my life than holding her and having no way to comfort her. There was no way I could. Not just about her grief for her brother, but for the injustices she thinks I suffered because of her. I didn’t see it that way. There was no right or wrong way to grieve, and I was learning that firsthand. Sometimes you could live your life for hours without thinking about it, and then other times, you barely made it minute to minute. Work helped, but the thoughts inside my head were loud when the night was quiet. They were filled with the pain of losing Daddy Nash coupled with the worry and wonder about who my biological father was.
Love trumps blood and DNA.
