I promised Izzie too. Just like you.
What?
That I wouldn’t forget about her.
We won’t. I just… I don’t know what we can do.
A tear spills over her cheek. Just one. She looks up at me, and even before she says it, I know. Somehow I know. And in the darkest corners of my heart, there is only relief, and I can’t be bothered to feel any guilt because of it. Maybe that’ll come later. But right now, it’s just relief.
“She’s dead,” Isabelle McKenna says. “Mom. She’s dead and I have nowhere else to go and Ty said if I needed help to find him and I need help! I need help so bad.” Her chest hitches, and it’s that, that little action, a little girl on the verge of tears standing in front of me, looking up at me like I’ll have all the answers that causes my knees to buckle.
And for the first time in my life, my little sister launches herself into my arms. The weight of her reminds me so much of Ty that I can barely breathe around the lump in my throat. She sobs bitterly against my chest. The blood roars in my ears.
You and me. That’ll never change, Papa Bear.
But it will, won’t it?
It’s already happening.
“Twins,” Otter says from somewhere behind us. He sounds just stupid with awe, and through the haze, I am barely grasping what he’s saying. “Jesus Christ. We’re having twins?”
DO YOU remember how it all began?
I do.
And this is where it begins again.
One last time.
PAST
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—George Santayana
1. Where Bear Makes the Wrong Assumption
I PARKED in the driveway, massaging my head, trying to curb the headache that’d been threatening all day. It probably hadn’t helped that I’d spent the day standing in the front of a classroom populated with the minds of the future. (Read: pubescent, hormonal teenagers who didn’t understand why they couldn’t have their smartphones out when Mr. Thompson was talking, and you can’t just take it away from me and put it in your desk, wait until my father hears about this. It was so hard not to snark right back that I couldn’t wait until his father heard about it, but since I was the responsible educator, I merely smiled and said the phone could be collected at the end of class.)
The sky was starting to streak, but it was unseasonably warm, the air already muggier than I had ever hoped it would be. For a moment, I allowed myself to miss the Pacific Ocean, but I pushed it away. This was our life now, and by choice. If I had to do it all over again, I’d be in the same exact place. Being here wasn’t about me, not really.
I pushed open the car door and stepped out, trying desperately to ignore the Easter decorations that had somehow popped up since I’d left this morning. I fumbled with my messenger bag and the key fob, grumbling about husbands that felt the need to have a ceramic rabbit carrying a basket filled with eggs sitting on the grass next to the cement path that led to the door. I paused when I reached the porch, rolling my eyes at the pastel garland wrapped around the railing.
(“But Bear, we need it to look amazing. You know that the spirit of the holidays flows through me and that there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Uh-huh. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Melanie Marshall from next door got first place last December in the neighborhood Christmas decoration contest and lorded that over you.”
“Absolutely not. And even if it did, everyone knows that the contest was rigged and that Melanie Marshall probably slept with half the judges. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I am going to crush her this year.”
“She didn’t sleep with half the—”
“You don’t know that.”
“Otter, you are thirty-seven years old and just declared war against a WASPy housewife who you accused of sleeping her way to first place.”
“Isn’t New Hampshire weird?”
“Fine. Just as long as you don’t sleep with the judges this year.”