Wake My Heart (Jasper Falls 1)

Why had the universe taken him from her? Why not take someone evil? Nash was good. He was everything to her. He was the other half of her soul. Without him, she was broken. Incomplete. Lost. Nothing.

When the sun set, the temperature dropped and she moved inside. She had a habit of forgetting to eat, so she indulged in her first meal of the day, a cold ham and cheese sandwich on white bread, chased by half a fifth of whiskey.

Once the alcohol dulled her senses, she ended up sitting at his piano. Her body curved under the weight of her grief, all the sharp, broken pieces of her heart cutting into her in ways even alcohol couldn’t numb.

Her head hung low as she traced her fingers over the worn keys. The soft plunking ping, ping, ping of a single white key filled the silence, the sound lonely and all too fitting.

“I can’t remember if I cried, when I read about his widowed bride…” Her hand slid off the keys falling into her lap. “…something touched me deep inside … the day the music died…”

A soft sob shivered out of her. She knew better than to sit at his piano.

Their home had never been a quiet place. Nash was music. He played, sang, and constantly listened. Music filled every corner of their life. Everything about him screamed rhythm and blues. When he died, he took the joy of music with him. Now all her favorite songs only brought sorrow in his absence. And all the things that he used to sing sat like dusty relics in a painfully hollow room.

She pressed the key again, and that solitary sound punched into her soul like a bullet. Sometimes she wished the shock of her pain was enough to knock her out cold, but there would be no sleeping for her on a night like tonight. When she let herself slip this far down the rabbit hole, the only peace she found came in drunken oblivion.

Taking her trusty bottle of whiskey, she dragged herself up the stairs to bed, passing out sometime around four in the morning with her phone in her hand and Nash’s recorded voice filling the darkness.

Chapter 5

“What is the world coming to?” Ryan’s mother cried, falling into an empty booth at the pub and dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin. She sniffed and unscrewed the lids of several ketchup bottles gathered on a round tray. “I just can’t bear it. We’re all getting so old. Who will be next?”

Ryan, trying to earn his way back into his mum’s good graces and perhaps get his hands on the meals she supposedly had earmarked for him in her freezer, attempted to match her devastation with appropriate sympathy.

“He had a good, long life, Mum. Try to think of how happy he was all those years up on the mountain.”

Angering the red, creped skin under her eyes with a stiff napkin, she nodded. “I know he seemed rough around the edges, but he really was a sweet boy. We all loved him so much, you know, even if we didn’t always show it.” She sniffed and shook her head. “I should have told him more often that he was a good boy.”

“I’m sure he knew, Mum.” Ryan bussed a table and carried the tray to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a damp rag. “He’s in a better place now.”

She formed the sign of the cross just as his Aunt Colleen showed up with a box of cabbage. Ryan quickly relieved her of the burden and took it to the back.

“Thanks, love. I’m growin’ feeble in my old age.” Colleen slid into the booth across from his mum, rattling all the ketchup bottles.

“You’re like an ox in a china shop,” his mum snapped, stilling the teetering bottles before they fell. “Do you mind?”

Aunt Col stuck her tongue out at her sister. “Quit your complaining. Ryan, love, be a dear and fetch your favorite aunt a beer. Something dark.”

He filled a pilsner at the tap and delivered it to the booth. “Mum, you want anything?”

“Only my youth back.”

Aunt Col rolled her eyes and took a sip of her beer. “Kelly has another art show this weekend, and Maureen and Frank are planning to check it out. That leaves us in charge of St. Paddy’s Day, and there’s no way I’m luggin’ all that corned beef and fifty pounds of potatoes to and from my car. You’d think we’d have half the brains to figure out a menu that was easier to transport by now.”

“That’s the menu, Colleen. That’s always been the menu.” His mother sniffled, topping off the ketchup bottles. “Besides, you love having everyone fawn all over your corned beef.”

“I do make it the best.” Aunt Col frowned. “You’re covered in hives, Rose. What the heck have you been doing?”