Page 147 of Sins or Secrets
I walk out of the bar and the cold night air hits me like a slap in the face.
Shit, even the fucking weather is out to get me now.
I walk down the path and continue past my office.
My car is parked in the parking lot but I won’t risk driving when I can’t even walk in a straight line.
It’s about an hour’s walk to the lake house.To home where my Quinn is, worrying about me.So many calls have come from her today.Calls and messages. Then the battery ran out and I didn’t recharge it.It’s been dead for hours and I’m sure she’s still trying to get me.
But, I can’t take her calls any more than I go back home and see her and hear her tell me those words.
I can’t be with you…
I’m choosing not to hear it for the third time in my life.
I’m choosing to be a coward.
I’m choosing to not be around her when I could be.
So in the pathetic mess that I am, I walk down the path that should lead me back to my old house and find myself enroute to the woodlands.
I walk through the darkness and the shadows of trees and the marshlands and on to the green hill far away.
It’s only when I get to Lilly’s grave that I realize where I am.
The grave next to hers is Uncle Barry’s.
But clearly I need Lilly tonight.I need the way she used to tame the beast in me, the rebel.
I need her words of wisdom to calm me and soothe me.I need to remember what she told me when Quinn first went away.
“Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps and the nerves prick, and tingle and the heart is sick, and the wheels of being start to slow,” I say, speaking the words of that old poem.In Memoriam.
I sink to the ground next to her head stone and remember when she first read it to me.
It was after Quin left ten years ago.But that wasn’t the first time I’d heard it.
I’d first heard her reading it after Barry died.
She’d read it out loud and I’d always get stuck on that verse.The most popular one. A lot of people don’t realize there’s a lot more to that poem.
Lilly knew the whole thing, and I knew because she knew.
That verse stuck in my head for all it meant.Those words, heart is sick, gripped me because to me it was talking about love and heartbreak.
Loss.
Quinn asked me what I wanted her to do.
What I wanted to ask her was to stay.
Stay for the relationship Lilly gave us a chance to rebuild.
Stay because her dream to run her own school is already happening, so how can leaving it behind be better than what she already has?
I want to ask her to stay for me.
Chapter 48
