“I know that it is.” His voice was gravelly, jarring in the peaceful night air.
Laurel turned, leaning her shoulder right next to his against the tree, her face only inches away, torturing him with its promise of a sweetness he could never receive. He could feel her looking at him and was glad for the darkness that allowed him blindness, an excuse to avoid the compassion he knew he’d read in those expressive gray eyes.
“I took a grief class, Scott, and it’s natural for you to blame yourself for living when Paul died—especially when you were driving the car—but it was not your fault. The car slid on a patch of ice. There was nothing anyone could do.”
She was repeating most of what he’d told her that day in the churchyard—he just hadn’t mentioned who’d been driving. He hadn’t realized she’d even heard him that day. And now he knew for sure that she hadn’t seen an accident report.
The car had slid on some ice. And there’d been nothing anyone could do after that. It was before the accident that things should have been done differently.
Stars were out now, twinkling a promise so far away he wondered how he’d ever believed in wishing on them.
“I wasn’t driving the car.”
“Of course you were. You and Paul both promised me when you went to Boston for that party that you’d do all the driving. Paul was a horrible winter driver. And it was your car.”
“I know. But I wasn’t driving.”
“I don’t understand.” He heard the confusion in her voice. She was so certain he and Paul wouldn’t lie to her. Her trust was that complete.
Another thing for him to destroy.
“I got drunk at the bachelor party,” he confessed. “Disgustingly, falling-down, passing-out drunk.”
“You don’t drink.”
“I know.”
“You never got drunk. Not in high school. Or college.”
“I know.”
“So...”
He was going to have to tell her. Right then. He struggled to find the right words.
“I got so drunk I stripped down to my briefs, stood on a table and sang karaoke.”
He’d hoped she’d laugh, that maybe they could bring a little levity into the conversation. Her silence told him what he’d already known. There was absolutely nothing funny about any of this.
Head down, he picked at blades of grass that were only shadows. “I was aiming for oblivion.”
“But why?”
The bitch of it was, he’d found neither. He could, still this night, remember every excruciating moment.
“The party ended at two in the morning. Up in my room, I pretended it was still going on. I turned on music videos and danced with a bottle until about four.”
“You had to leave for Cooper’s Corner at six.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t know what time it was?”
“I knew.” Every single minute that had ticked by was a minute closer to a life he couldn’t stomach thinking about—a life with Laurel as Paul’s wife.
As it turned out, the minutes were ticking away the last hours of Paul’s life.
“When Paul knocked on the door at six, I was sitting on the bathroom floor, thinking about getting sick.”