For a moment, she looked like she was going to protest, but she didn’t. Instead, she nodded and then walked over to Jacob and crouched down.
“She had only just found out and was going to tell you that night. She wanted to call her Hope. Because it was what you had given her from the moment she’d met you. Hope.”
Tears streamed down Jacob’s face but he said nothing. There was nothing he could say.
There was nothing anyone could say.
INDY
Mirabella was buried on a cloudless Fall morning in November. While Isaac’s funeral had been somber and dramatic with a stormy sky, Mirabella was buried in the beautiful warmth of the Mississippi sunshine. Her closed coffin was draped in a sea of magnolias and irises, her favorite flowers, and in the center of the arrangement was a small envelope addressed to Mirabella and Hope. It was a final farewell from a grieving husband and father-to-be.
Jacob was inconsolable. It was like the light had gone out of him.
Finally sober for the first time since his wife’s murder, he wasn’t able to cope with his grief, and at one stage his knees crumpled beneath him and Cade and Caleb had to hold him up. He was devastated. Broken. Destroyed.
Afterwards, when everyone went to the wake at the clubhouse, Jacob sat motionless in his chair at her graveside, staring with unseeing eyes at her coffin as tears spilled down his cheeks.
Cade, Caleb, and I hung back. I was gutted. My chest full of grief. But it wasn’t even in the realm of Jacob’s pain.
Suddenly rising to his feet, Jacob walked toward his wife’s coffin, his eyes dazed and unfocused, his face slack with despondence, his arms hanging motionless at his side. I linked my fingers into Cade’s big hand and we glanced at one another, worried. Then, just as suddenly as he had stood up, Jacob dropped to his knees and fell backwards, his broad chest exposed to the sky as a primal roar ripped out of the very core of him to shatter the stillness of the afternoon.
Tears streamed down my face as I watched him unravel in front of us, his pain exposed, his body rigid and stiff with the anguish erupting from him. Veins bulged like ropes in his neck and forehead as his roar grew hoarse and rough, and the energy finally petered out. He fell forward onto all fours and hung his head low, his body wracked with the sobbing that consumed him.
Caleb and Cade went to him. Cade knelt down.
“Let us take care of you, brother,” I heard him say.
Caleb and Cade got him into an awaiting car. He hadn’t ridden his bike to the funeral. He hadn’t ridden his bike since the day Mirabella had died, and it was probably a good thing because he was in no state to operate a vehicle. Cade opened the door for me and I slid into the backseat beside Jacob, curling my hand in his and holding it tight during the ride to the wake.
Mirabella’s parents had organized the celebration of her life at Jacob and Mirabella’s home, and the backyard was full of friends and family, drinking and celebrating the beautiful young woman we had all loved and cherished. Everywhere you looked there were flowers and photographs of a smiling Mirabella, and every time I glanced at her smiling face, I couldn’t believe that she was gone.
Unable to handle the crowd, Jacob grabbed a full bottle of bourbon and walked back into the house, disappearing into his bedroom with a slam of the door. He had refused any medication for his grief. Now he was going to medicate with liquor.
“What do we do?” I asked Cade.
“We leave him to grieve the way he wants to,” he said.
I spent the next hour talking with Mirabella’s family and her sister Cora. I made small talk with strangers, had wine with Ronnie and my mom and some of the other old ladies, and helped to clear away plates of food from the picnic table when the sun began to sink and people started to disperse. As dusk turned to night, I went inside and walked straight into Cade, suddenly realizing I hadn’t seen him for the last hour.
“Sorry, baby, I’ve been with Jacob,” he said.
“Is he okay?”
He shook his head. “No. He is far from okay. Bull and Maverick have taken him back to the clubhouse. We don’t want him to be alone.”
He stepped closer to me and ran his big hands up my arms. He looked exhausted but still very physically powerful and strong. He bent his head and kissed me, pressing his lips to my ear.
“Let’s get out of here. I need to hold you,” he whispered roughly. “I need you in my arms.”
I nodded and wrapped my arms around his thick waist, finding comfort in the gentle thump of his heartbeat. “Take me home,” I murmured.