Wake My Heart (Jasper Falls 1)

She looked inside the firepit and stilled. The ashes were shoveled out, and all signs of last night’s fire were gone.

“What the hell?”

She checked the trashcans by the shed. The empty bottle of Jameson sat on top of the damp ashes. Who did this?

Her gaze lifted, taking in the familiar view of her neighbor’s house, and her hand flew to her mouth as she remembered him kissing her last night. “Oh, my God.”

Her gaze shot back to Nash’s empty chair. Her heart raced as she struggled to find a way to make this sickening feeling inside of her go away.

He kissed her! Or she kissed him? She couldn’t remember. But there was a kiss. She was going to be sick. She had been sick!

Her gaze darted to the lawn. Not a trace of puke. Did her neighbor clean up her shame vomit? That was incredibly disgusting and equally sweet.

No! She would not think of him in any favorable manner. He was her neighbor. And he was intrusive. Nosy. Why had he come over last night?

She couldn’t remember, and her head pounded whenever she thought beyond her natural reflexes.

But he’d rescued her at the bar. He was sweet. Still, they were going to live next to each other. He wasn’t renting the house. He owned his home as much as she owned hers. Her behavior yesterday was unacceptable. She’d make sure nothing like that ever happened again, nothing to threaten the safety of her only sanctuary.

Glancing at the time on her phone, she winced, already running late. Today was not a day to get lost in overthinking things. Today was a day for autopilot.

Tossing her thermos into the basket of her bike, she started peddling toward the cemetery. It was a dry morning, nothing like the snowy mess it had been two years before.

The ride across town helped soothe her aching head. She hopped off her bike, leaning it against the wrought iron fence that lined the cemetery but staggered just before the gate, her guilt chomping at her steadiness.

Did he know what she’d done? Her views on heaven and any afterlife jumbled the moment he left her. She stopped believing in any sort of God when the universe stole her husband, taking him to a place she couldn’t follow.

But what if there was a heaven? She convinced herself there was, on most days, simply so she could make it through, selling the promise that they might someday meet again. However, if there was an afterlife and Nash could somehow see her, he’d know what she’d done last night.

The weight of the thermos grew heavy in her hand. She only had ten minutes to have coffee with him if she planned to be on time for work. Her throat repeatedly swallowed. Maybe she should just confess what she’d done and be done with it. It wasn’t like it meant anything.

Did it?

She hadn’t thought of kissing anyone aside from Nash since the fifth grade when Danny Darushak dared to spend seven minutes in heaven with her. Nash hated Danny.

What possessed her to kiss her neighbor? Alcohol and gut-wrenching sadness wasn’t a recipe for good choices, so she needed to chill with the drinking.

Wiping her clammy palms down the front of her hoody, she forced herself to walk to his grave. The entire time her mind went back and forth on what she might say to him when she got there.

“What the hell?” Her thoughts derailed as she spotted a patch of purple hyacinths surrounding his headstone. She dropped to her knees. “Who did this?”

Leaning forward, she breathed in the unique scent. They smelled like spring. She remembered he used to buy his mom hyacinths every Easter Sunday before they met the rest of the O’Malleys at church.

The thought of her mother-in-law filled her with more guilt. There was one other woman on earth who felt the loss of Nash as deeply as Maggie, and that was his mother, Caitlin O’Malley. She must have had the flowers special ordered to get them this early in the year.

“Your mom was here,” she said, brushing a loving hand over the small purple petals. “I haven’t talked to her in a while. I should probably stop by for a visit.”

Nash’s relationship with his father ran hot and cold. He never fully supported his son’s dreams to become a musician. Like Maggie’s mother, his father objected to them getting married so young. But Caitlin always saw so much talent and hope in her son. She believed their marriage was an inevitable part of their future so marrying young didn’t make a difference.

How wrong his mother had been. They had no future. “I can’t imagine what this is like for her.”

Maggie met Nash in kindergarten when he asked if she’d trade her chocolate milk for his apple juice. She hated apple juice and had an addiction to chocolate, but on that day, there was something about the little boy asking her for an unfair trade, something that made her give away her prized chocolate milk for a crummy juice box. That might have been the day she fell in love with him.