He moved toward her, his boots crunching on the cold grass. When he got closer, she could see the tear tracks on his cheeks, and it hurt to know how much she’d hurt him. She’d never wanted to do that, not even years ago. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but the words were little and useless. So she sat there, staring at him, waiting.
He got to the bench and sat down beside her. “I want to hate you for this,” he said at last.
“I know.”
“But you’re the person I wrote that letter to.”
“Yes.”
He wouldn’t look at her. “It must have killed you.”
She wanted to take his face in her hands and force him to look at her, but she didn’t have the courage to touch him. “You know what got me through it?”
“Tell me.”
She could hear the rawness in his voice, the need to understand. “It was Francis. He was a gentle, loving soul who would have given his life to save a stranger, let alone his own brother. He loved you, Angel, and there was no question about what he would have wanted.”
“He was so damned good,” he whispered. “Even when we were kids and I was such an asshole—he always believed the best of me.”
“He didn’t give up his life for you. It’s important that you understand that. He died. Period. And what came afterwards was a gift from the God he loved. Something good came out of his death, but it didn’t cause it. You didn’t cause his death.”
“You don’t understand, Mad…”
This time she couldn’t help touching him. The pain in his voice was like a knife. She leaned forward, touched his cheek in a gentle, fleeting caress. “Make me understand.”
He stiffened, and she could tell that he was grasping for self-control. “I don’t deserve his heart. I can’t… be like him.”
“Oh, Angel,” she breathed. “It would hurt him to hear you say that. You know it would.”
He drew back. “I can’t live for him. I don’t have it in me to be that noble.”
She touched his chest, felt his heartbeat, and in that fluttering rhythm she found a dawning sense of hope. “You have Francis’s heart and your soul, Angel. You have it in you to be anything.”
Tears filled his eyes as he looked at her. She curled her arms around him and drew him to her. He buried his face in the crook of her neck. She stroked his hair and rocked him gently, telling him over and over again that it was okay.
Finally he drew back. “I’m scared, Maddy…”
“I know.”
“I don’t know where to go from here, where Francis would want me to go.”
; “Just take it one day at a time.”
He laughed. “You sound like my counselor at Betty Ford.”
She smiled. “Where do you want to go from here, Angel? Why don’t you start with that?”
He looked down at her, and she could have sworn there was love in his eyes. “Home,” he said simply. “I want to go home.”
Chapter Twenty-three
He knows the night is growing colder. He can see evidence of the chill, even though he can’t feel it. The sky has turned a dense black, the way it often does in the waning days of November. Trees huddle together alongside the roadway, and if he listens very carefully, he can hear them whispering among themselves, shivering at the cold. He wonders why he’s never heard them talking before.
But now he hears so many different things—the percussive patter of raindrops when they hit the spiked top of the picket fence, the gentle thud of a fallen leaf. Even the starlight makes a sound, a low buzzing drone that reminds him of the bees that gather in her rose garden in the first full days of summer. Everything makes a sound, it seems, but the porch swing, which hangs heavy and still beneath him. And him. He is the quietest thing of all.
The neighborhood animals know he is here. On nights like this, when it is cold and dark, they creep past the house, their golden eyes trained on him, their hackles up. When he sees them, he thinks he feels something, a tingling in his fingertips that feels like memory, as if he could recall how soft they’d been, how comforting it had once been to pet a household cat. But the tingling is imaginary. He knows he has no real sense of touch anymore. He just remembers because it feels good to remember, and he has nothing else to do.