Brant's Return

My heart skipped a beat and then resumed in quick staccato. “What do you mean, she isn’t? She’s still out riding?” Was she hurt?

“No, no. She took the truck and drove to see her parents.”

Her parents? A jolt of worry speared through me. Why? She’d questioned whether they’d had something to do with the deaths of her family, and dismissed it, but . . . I still didn’t like it. And I had no actual idea how to get to her. “Ah, where?” I asked.

May walked behind the island, bending and looking at something in the oven. “Well, I know it’s Ohio Amish country. I’m afraid I don’t have the exact address.” She appeared thoughtful for a moment. “Your father might, if she listed them as next of kin on any of the employment forms.”

“Right. Where is my father? Upstairs?”

“No. Actually, he rode to the breeding stable with Mick. It’s good for him to get out, and I’m glad whenever he feels up to it.”

I nodded, and it really hit me standing there looking at May’s kind face that eventually, sooner not later, my father would succumb to his illness. Had I not believed it until now? No . . . I still couldn’t wrap my head around a world that didn’t contain the larger-than-life personality of Harrison Talbot.

I cleared my throat, feeling a strange swirling inside, overwhelmed by a hundred different emotions simultaneously: worry about Isabelle, sadness about where we had ended up, confusion about my feelings for my father . . . ah, hell, I didn’t even know. “I’m going to go put my bag in my room,” I told May, turning away.

“Sounds good, Brant. The sheets are clean.”

The sheets. Those sheets upon which I’d made love to Isabelle again and again, the ones we’d spent that glorious weekend between when we’d had the house all to ourselves. I set my travel bag on the floor, memories both assaulting me and caressing me, heat moving over my skin as cold regret settled in my bones. That weekend . . . I’d been happy, free, but half out of my head in a way that sent dread spiraling through me. The way I felt for Isabelle was a dizzying whirling tornado that I couldn’t control . . . and I, no, I couldn’t let it pull me under. I’d already decided that.

But if I didn’t, I’d never win Isabelle back.

I left the room, heading toward the office. The office where Isabelle worked. I could picture her now, sitting in the oversized leather desk chair, one ankle crossed over the other as she bit the inside of her cheek in concentration. Christ, this whole house was filled with memories of her. I clenched my eyes shut, wanting her here with me so desperately it was a physical ache.

I opened the desk drawers but there were only supplies inside them. There were no file drawers in the office at all. “Where do you keep your employment papers, old man?” I murmured.

Back in the foyer, I took the stairs two at a time the way I’d done when I was a teenager. My father’s door was half open and I went inside, heading straight for his desk.

The first drawer I opened held a stack of manila file folders, the top one unlabeled. Of course. Just like my father. He’d always been so disorganized. I pulled it out and opened it, and it appeared to be a pile of business receipts, for tax purposes presumably. The folder underneath that one didn’t have a label either, and I pulled it out, expecting more random papers and instead came face to face with . . . my own face. It was an article from a few months before about my nightclubs. Frowning, I took it out, finding another article underneath that one—a review of the food at one of my bars. What the hell? Sitting in the desk chair behind me, I put the folder on my lap and leafed quickly through the huge stack of articles and clippings. They were all about me, going back to the very first business I’d opened when I was twenty-five.

He’d kept updated, on my life, my successes and my failures, all these years. My heart clenched painfully in my chest, emotion overwhelming me. Oh Jesus, Dad. Despite everything, he had cared. I didn’t know how to feel about it, didn’t even really want to think about it all, considering the turmoil I was already in regarding Isabelle. Too much. It’s too much.

I started to put the file folder back when I glimpsed the edge of a piece of paper with what I recognized as my mother’s handwriting. My heart lurched, and I reached for it as if I’d spotted the tips of her fingers appearing through a cloudy wall of mist. It was a note, and as my eyes scanned the lines, a lump filled my throat and I closed my eyes tight. Oh God.

I was so surprised, so overwhelmed with emotion, I didn’t hear my father come up the stairs, didn’t know he was in the house at all until he stepped in the door. His eyes moved to the stack of papers in my lap, the note in my hand, and then to my face. For a second he appeared frozen, but then his expression melted into one of resignation.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“For what good reason, Brant?”

He stepped farther into the room, and I could see that he was moving as if in pain, one measured step before another. He sank into the armchair, taking a deep breath and looking at me.

“The truth. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

“You were hurting. How much more would it have hurt to know about that?” He waved his hand toward the note still clutched in my hand.

“My mother was having an affair, Dad. She was leaving you for another man for Christ’s sake! And you let me think you were the bad guy.”

“Ah, Brant. I was the bad guy. Life isn’t a fairy tale. In real life, there can be more than one villain.”

As I stared at him, that day came back to me in living color. My mother had taken me out to lunch. She’d been in that mood of hers that I hated: flighty, erratic, unpredictable, crazy. She’d poured salt on the table from th

e shaker and had drawn pictures in it and laughed. I’d been embarrassed and ashamed. We’d come home and walked into the house, and there was my father, kissing his secretary against the wall. Mom had crumbled, and horror and betrayal had coursed through me as I’d tried to comfort my sobbing mother. I’d found her later that day in a pool of blood in the bathroom.

Because my father had cheated on her in her own home and she couldn’t bear it. Only . . .

“I messed up, Brant. Your mother had left that note for me a few days before. She was in love with another man and was leaving with him. We fought, she cried, told me it wasn’t her fault, that you loved who you loved and that was it. I told her if she was going to skip out on her family, she’d have to be the one to tell you. It was her responsibility, not mine. I figured, ah hell, I figured she’d change her mind, come to her senses. You know your mother was prone to these ideas that—”

“That flew away with the next strong breeze.”