Falling for the Brother

Did he need someone to hug that night? He’d said, after the funeral reception at Miriam’s, that he was going home to do some follow-up reports on a case in North Carolina he’d closed the previous week.

She couldn’t picture him there, home alone, doing paperwork, on the night his brother was buried.

Walking along a second row of cucumbers, noticing the numbers and sizes of vegetables on the vines, she thought about the night Bruce had sent Mason to find her. The way Mason had done exactly as his brother had asked, in spite of the fact that Bruce had been unfaithful the night before.

Mason had been a victim of Bruce’s, too. Whether he knew it or not.

Was that why he hadn’t contacted Harper after they’d spent the night together?

Why he’d let five years of silence fall between them? Because Bruce had manipulated him into thinking it was what Harper wanted.

Shaking but not cold, Harper wrapped her arms around herself. Turned to walk back up the same row, seeing the house in the distance. Her vehicle out front.

Bruce was buried. Gone.

Unless she and Mason let him continue to manipulate them.

The only way he could still come between Harper and Mason was if they let him.

Heart pounding, she sped up, at a full run by the time she got to the back door. Inside, she grabbed her purse. “I’m going out for a while,” she told her parents. “I’ll have my cell on.”

They nodded. Her mother looked worried, told her to be careful, and her dad turned up the volume on the TV.

* * *

SHE’D BEEN PLANNING to drive to his house, but parked before she got to the road that would lead her there. He wouldn’t be home. But she had a pretty good idea where he’d be.

Where she would’ve gone if she hadn’t had Brianna to care for, feed and put to bed.

In jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, she wasn’t really dressed for October on a northern California beach, but not even her tennis shoes in the sand slowed her down.

She hadn’t brought a light with her, but she knew where she was going, had the moon to guide her, her cell phone in her back pocket and her gun to keep her safe.

No one else was out that night, and for a second she stood still, breathing in the ocean air, feeling the cool breeze on hot cheeks, listening to the sound of a gentle tide. If she was right, he’d be about a quarter mile up the beach to the right. There was an embankment there, one that would shield you from most of the cold, provide a support for your back and keep you somewhat sheltered from peering eyes.

She knew because it was the same place she’d chosen the night her life had fallen apart. For the first time.

Four years earlier had been the second time.

Three months ago had been the third.

She wasn’t going to let it happen a fourth.

She saw him while she was still several yards away, and had a feeling, from the turn of his head, that he’d seen her first. He wasn’t standing, but he hadn’t tried to leave, either.

“Hey.” She walked up. Stood there looking at him still in his dress clothes, shiny black shoes and all, sitting in the sand. He’d lost the tie. His shirt was undone a couple of buttons, as though he’d been too hot.

“Mind if I sit down?” she asked.

He motioned at the sand.

“You did everything you could do for him,” she said, not bothering with small talk. There was nothing small about this moment.

Chin jutting out, he nodded, facing the ocean. The moonlight left a streak of light across the bridge of his nose. The rest of his face was in shadow.

“He was a master, Mason. He had the ability to do great things. But he was also human. And weak. And his weak side pulled him down as much as his good side lifted him up.”

She’d spent some time with Sara over the past couple of months, mostly just to talk. To check her own mind. To be certain, absolutely certain, that she wasn’t fooling herself.

He was looking at her now, and she felt encouraged.

She was pretty sure she knew some of what he was feeling—some of the same struggles she’d faced. She’d been a little ahead of him, maybe, in that she’d been strong enough to pull away, at least in part, four years before Bruce’s final reckoning.

“He was gifted with the ability to motivate people, to get them to do as he needed them to do. We couldn’t fight that,” she said. “Just like we wouldn’t be able to play the piano like Mozart. Or be immune to the beauty of his music.” She’d come up with that analogy on her own, but had run it by Sara.