CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rhys clutched Andie, feeling the soft whisper of her hair against his cheek and the tremors that shook her body, cursing his own helplessness because he didn’t know how to make this better. He didn’t even know where to begin.
The most powerful loss he’d ever experienced was the wrenching pain of Will’s diagnosis, the cruel dissolution of the dreams he held for the child of his imagination. But the heavy weight on his chest—the terrible anxiety that had dogged him as Will missed his developmental milestones, and the grief that crushed him when the diagnosis was confirmed—had lifted over the past several weeks. Will was alive. Will was whole. Will was a miracle in his own right. He was brave and beautiful, and as full of potential as any other child. He was not lost forever. Not like Andie’s little brother.
He hardly knew what to do as she trembled against him. He wanted to pour his strength into her, give her every scrap of the resilience she’d restored to him. His chest hurt, as if she had somehow crept into a secret inner chamber of his heart, and her tears were scouring him from the inside. And, in a way, that was what had happened, he realized with a start.
He was in love with her. Definitively, irreversibly in love with this woman whose fear and reticence now made an awful kind of sense, but whose strength and kindness had managed to change him anyway.
The knowledge of it sank in, bone deep. I love her. Of course he loved her. She’d captivated him, ever since her first day in his house, with her generosity and her sweetness. There was an enchantment about her. Will had seen it from the start, and it had worked its magic on Rhys—cracked him right open. Made him see things that were never possible before.
Oblivious to the cold and damp seeping through the legs of his jeans, he cupped her face, pushing back fallen strands of hair from her wet cheeks and pressing feverish kisses to her forehead, her earlobes, her closed eyelids. I’ve got you. Just hold on, and we’ll ride this out together.
No wonder she’d reacted with such horror when Will had pulled free from her grip in the crosswalk weeks ago. God, her blood must have run cold. And yet she’d stayed, in spite of the terrible tug of grief and dread. In spite of the fact that doing so meant waking up each day to face her worst fears. She’d stayed to help him, because he had asked. Now, he wanted more than anything to return the favor.
“Andie, you were eleven years old when it happened,” he said. “It was a terrible accident, but it wasn’t your fault.”
“I took my eyes off him,” she declared. “I said I’d watch him, and I didn’t. If I hadn’t pretended to be sick to get out of my piano lesson, we never would have been there in the first place. And if I hadn’t let myself look at Dolan’s window . . .”
“What if your mother hadn’t dragged the two of you out that afternoon?” Rhys countered. “What if she hadn’t decided to leave her two young children on a street corner so she could get the car? What if Earl Peterson had left his house thirty seconds later? What if his wife had bought the milk? It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Susan blames me,” Andie said starkly. She pulled slightly away and started to gather that familiar shell of grim stoicism around her. She wasn’t done blaming herself, either, apparently.
“You were an eleven-year-old child,” he repeated, frustration clawing at his insides. “You should have been playing catch and focusing on your long division. Not shouldering responsibility for matters of life and death.”
“That doesn’t matter to her.”
But does it matter to you? Rhys looked at her intently, wondering. Would Susan Tilly have been able to get away with her torturous seventeen-year mind warp if Andie hadn’t been so willing to carry the burden of guilt? But then, Andie could hardly have done otherwise. She’d been a mere child—vulnerable, impressionable—forced to bend and conform to a cruel set of circumstances beyond her control, to grow in a shape that fit them, like a tree buffeted by an ocean gale. Trained to view herself as culpable. More culpable than the mother who left her eleven-year-old to wrangle her hyperactive, overtired toddler brother on a dark street corner. More culpable than the man who drove the car that hit her brother, if Susan’s magnanimous hiring decision was any indication. Rhys burned with a blast of fury.
“What do you want from her now, Andie?” he asked urgently. Whatever she needed from her mother to mitigate her pain, to make her whole, he was determined to get for her. “Does it even matter what she thinks anymore? Hasn’t she forfeited any right to pass judgment on you?”
“I want her forgiveness.” Andie’s eyes glittered. “It might be stupid after all this time, but—God help me—I still want it. I don’t think I’ll ever have any peace until I get it.”
“Then that is what you will have,” Rhys responded. “I’ll talk to her—”
More tears trickled down Andie’s cheeks, but now she was smiling.
“No, Rhys,” she protested. “That’s probably the sweetest thing anybody has ever offered to do for me, but this is my battle to fight. I need to do it myself.”
“Okay, then.” Rhys helped her to her feet and stood facing her, running his hands from her shoulders down to her fingertips and back up again, trying to warm her. “I suppose it should be now. Today. What do you need? Coffee? Wine? I could take you for a drink first. We passed a bar on the way through town. Do you think it’s open now?”
“It’s after twelve, so I suppose so.” Andie was laughing now, her cheeks still wet. “But, no. I don’t need anything extra. Just you in my corner.”
“That, you can count on.” He looked at her red, blotchy face, puffy eyes, and bedraggled ponytail, and felt his heart squeeze.
“And chocolate afterward?”
“Consider it done.”
“We need to talk.” Fortified by a cup of tea and an impassioned pep talk from Rhys, Andie had gone in search of Susan. She felt strangely buoyant, the impression of Rhys’s arms around her still making her skin tingle. My love. She wondered whether he realized what he’d said, or whether the words were just the generic endearments of a fraught moment. And if he’d meant them, what should she do? Half of her wanted to soak them up, like drenching rain to her thirsty heart, while the other half wanted to bolt in fear. She couldn’t think about it now.
She found Susan in the storage room in the side aisle of the barn, a room that had once been Bingo’s stall. Her mother had completely overhauled the barn ten years ago, and pristine poured-concrete flooring and tiers of shelves partially obscured the room’s original function, but the wall facing the breezeway, with its barred window and sliding door, was unchanged. Andie gazed at the familiar nicks and dents in the stall door, trying to conjure the gentle presence of her beloved chestnut horse. Now the space was sterile, smelling of cardboard and coffee grounds. She stood in the doorway, ensuring that Susan would have no choice but to face her.
“Oh, it’s you, Andrea.” Susan tore into a bulk box of coffee-creamer tubs and loaded a fresh supply into a Tupperware container to bring out to her guests. Her task completed, she stepped forward expectantly, poised for Andie to let her by. “Can this wait?”
“No, actually, it can’t,” Andie said. “We need to deal with this now.”
“Deal with what?”
“Your attitude to me, the way you treat me. It has to stop.”
“Really, Andrea.” Susan shook her head wearily. “There’s no need to be so melodramatic. I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss over. I call you. I invite you here.”
“Once a year, to wait on your friends,” Andie pointed out. “To keep paying off my debt, isn’t that right? But I never deserve my own seat at the table.” Andie couldn’t even count the number of family events she’d been excluded from over the years. Louisa’s and Rose’s children barely even knew her as their aunt. “Let’s just get it out in the open, for once. You still blame me for what happened to Gus.”
Susan’s head came up, her eyes glinting dangerously, as if Andie had no right to speak his name—as if that were Susan’s prerogative alone.
“Do you think I don’t mourn for him?” Andie demanded. “Do you think a single day goes by when I don’t feel his loss with every cell in my body?”
“You don’t know the first thing about it,” Susan snapped. “He was my child.”
“And I was your child, too. Eleven years old. I’ve already served a sentence that’s lasted my whole lifetime over again, and more, since it happened. How much longer do I have to wait until you’ll forgive me? You apparently have no issue with Earl Peterson. You hired him as a driver, for God’s sake! But I’m still a lost cause?”
“Earl . . . that’s none of your business.” Susan placed the container of creamers down on a shelf and put her hands on her hips, her stance wide, emphatic.
“I think it is,” Andie retorted. “There was more than one factor involved that night. Yes, I looked away when I should have been watching Gus, and I’ll spend my whole life being sorry for that. But I was just an exhausted eleven-year-old who’d been dragged around for hours on a fool’s errand. You know what Gus was like. You couldn’t handle him under those conditions. How did you expect me to? Why were we even out so late that night anyway? In the dark and the sleet?”
Fear streaked through her veins. It felt dangerous to be asking the questions. Making the demands.
Susan lowered her head, her shoulders rounding as she braced her hands on her thighs for a few moments. Her rib cage heaved as she took a series of harsh breaths. When she finally straightened, her stare was flat and dark.
“I’ll tell you why we were out,” she said, her voice low and deadly. “Because it was Tuesday, and your father was trying to sleep off a mean buzz, like he always did after coming home from third shift and holing up with his Old Crow. Your piano lesson was a safe place for us to break up the afternoon so the two of you wouldn’t go stir-crazy at home and wake him up. But that day we didn’t go.”
She gave a smile so bitter it should have puckered her mouth. “You were only too happy to go purring up to your father when he was in a good mood—like you were his pet cat. But he wasn’t so crazy about you getting in his face when it didn’t suit him. Gus, either. I was the one who had to look out for you, keep everyone safe. But what would you know about that? Huh?”
Andie quailed to see the anger in her mother’s face, hard and unyielding. The way Susan said it, purring up to your father, made her want to retch. Like there was something dirty in it. But, thank God that had never been the case. Still, something about Andie’s bond with Jim obviously provoked a visceral reaction in her mother. My child was how she’d referred to Gus. As if Andie weren’t a part of her, too. As if she were simply Jim’s child—co-opted to his side as his ally, his favorite daughter—and therefore exiled from her mother’s affections forever.
“Do want to know what he did, the time before that, when I couldn’t keep you kids quiet, and he was sleeping off a hangover?” Susan’s expression was frighteningly avid, obscene with the hurt she knew she was inflicting and the gruesome satisfaction of it.
No, Andie thought, she really didn’t want to know. She really didn’t need to know more now.
“He shoved me so hard into a doorframe he dislocated my shoulder. He made me tell the doctors I’d slipped in the shower.”
Andie flinched, and a ripple of triumph passed across Susan’s face. “So that’s why we were out in the dark and the cold. And that’s why, when it finally hit six thirty, I had to get you and Gus into the goddamn car, because if that man’s dinner wasn’t hot and on the table by seven, things could go south pretty darn quickly.”
Andie ached for her mother, hemmed into that volatile world of banality and violence, focused on the singular goal of survival, with no room for softness or joy, no room for compassion or gentleness—certainly no room for the magic of a Christmas window. Hopelessness fluttered in her chest, along with a painful yearning for her mother to see her as the child she once was, not just as an instrument of tragedy or an extension of the man she’d loved and had come to hate. She needed Susan to finally recognize her as the daughter she still wanted to be, if given half a chance.
“I’m sorry,” Andie said softly. “And you’re right. I didn’t know. What he did to you was unforgivable. But, Mom, he’s been gone for ten years now. And I’m still your daughter. I need to hear from you that when you look at me you see more than just the person who let go of Gus’s hand.”
Andie dropped her hands to her sides and waited, looking straight at her mother. Remember the tea set and the daisy chains, she willed. Please, Mom.
Susan looked right back, something in her expression softening for a moment as she looked at Andie’s flushed cheeks and her messy ponytail. But then the brittle screen shuttered her eyes again, and she looked away.
“You promised you’d watch him,” she said, her voice faltering for an instant as she repeated the old refrain.
Andie froze. “So, that’s it, then.” She felt like she was deflating, the breath departing her body, like the fleeing inhabitants of a town in the path of an advancing army. But when she next inhaled, she was surprised to find that she did not feel desolate or cowed. She felt strangely cleansed. All hope of reconciliation with her mother might have fled, but the ghosts had fled, too. The tension that had simmered between them for seventeen years was out in the open, put into words, and deprived of its ability to draw power from the shadows. “I’ll be on my way.”
Susan picked up the tub of creamers and hugged it to her chest, a strange expression on her face.
“I won’t expect an invitation next year,” Andie said, her resolve solidifying. “I can’t do this anymore.”
She turned away, skimming her fingers along the barred door of Bingo’s stall. Good-bye. Stepping into the aisle, she looked back through the bars of the stall at her mother, still frozen in place.
“I’m proud of what you’ve done with the farm. You’ve made it into a place that makes people happy.”
With that, she started walking. Long, deliberate paces, trying to ignore a new, ferocious burning in her chest. Would this really be the last time she set foot on the Tilly farm? It would have to be, if her decision was to stick.
She emerged, slightly disoriented, into the happy din of the barn. Rhys, who’d been pacing with a tired Will in his arms, rushed toward her expectantly. It almost broke her heart to see the hope and concern in his eyes. She gave a brief, quashing shake of her head to signal the failure of her mission.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I’ll be fine. Let’s get out of here. I just have to go to the house first to get something.”
Rhys reached one arm out, pulling her close to press his lips against her flushed forehead. “I’ll say good-bye to your sisters.”
Andie trudged toward the modest white farmhouse. More than 150 years old, it was the product of a former age—unassuming and functional. She pushed open the unlocked front door and stepped inside, her tread making the floorboards creak exactly where she knew they would. The house’s familiar smell engulfed her, but she stopped in surprise as she looked around. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d set foot inside, but the changes were striking.
The wall dividing the living room and dining room had been knocked out, and the space, while still far from grand in scale, was open and comfortable. The walls were a warm dove gray, and a bold tomato-red sofa took pride of place against one wall, adorned with splashy cushions in white and red. It felt as if a hand other than Susan’s had been at work in the decorating style. Through a sleek cutout in the dining-room wall, she could see a gleaming new kitchen, one that displaced the ghosts of her childhood from their familiar seats.
If she and Susan had any kind of a relationship, she should have known about this transformation of the farmhouse, Andie realized. For years, her connection with her mother had been a fragile, insubstantial thing. And yet, for so long, she’d allowed Susan’s view of her to remain the organizing principle of her life—dictating who she was, what she was entitled to, where her hopes could lead. She’d submitted to Susan’s imperative that her dreams be cut down to size, parceling the different facets of herself into boxes as confining as the poky rooms of her childhood home. And all the while, Susan had been renovating and expanding, turning the farm into a successful business, allowing her vision free rein.
Andie felt a stab of regret. For time wasted, for decisions made through a contorted lens. She turned and ran up the narrow staircase to her childhood bedroom on the second floor. It, too, had changed. The twin beds had been taken out, the carpet pulled up. The refinished hardwood floor gleamed, and a large desk stood in the corner near the window. Anxiety clutched Andie’s chest. Where is it? She scanned the changed landscape of the room, her heartbeat drumming frantically until her gaze finally landed on the worn spine of a photo album bound in blue gingham, nestled in the far corner of a bookshelf.
She plucked the album from the shelf where it sat beside other, similar volumes. This one was hers, the place where she’d painstakingly gathered her memories of Gus, and of her childhood before the accident, as well as a few later photos. She’d never been able to have it in her apartment, but now she was ready to claim it.
Tucking the album under her arm, she headed back downstairs and straight out the front door, pulling it shut behind her.
Rhys had the car idling in the driveway, Will already buckled into his car seat. Andie ran over and jumped in, settling the photo album on her lap.
“Ready?” Rhys asked.
“Never readier,” Andie said firmly. As Rhys pulled the car out, she turned to look back at the barn.
Denise Hendrix emerged in the doorway, a frown on her face. She walked out toward the parking lot, still wearing Susan’s old leather apron, scanning the area. She caught sight of the Range Rover just as Rhys turned onto the road and, her pace picking up, raised her hand as if to flag them down. But the car was already speeding away from the farm. Andie watched as the red barn and small white house receded in the distance, the figure of Denise outlined against the shrinking backdrop of her childhood.
“She what?” Rhys sputtered on the drive back to Concord, as Andie gave him the gist of what Susan had said to her. He supposed he must be a complete innocent, but it cut him to the quick to hear of a parent treating her child that way.
“Don’t worry,” Andie said. “I’ll get over it. At least I got it out in the open and asked for her absolution, point-blank.”
“Sure,” Rhys conceded, frowning. It might be an improvement, but it was hardly a satisfactory result. She was putting a brave face on it, but she looked small and wan, and her hand quivered slightly as he enfolded it in his.
“Rhys?” she said tentatively.
“Yes?”
“I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.” The serious look on her face set his heart thumping.
“When I took this job with you and Will, I didn’t do it for the purest of reasons.”
“Oh?” Not sure where this was going, Rhys could do nothing but facilitate whatever it was she needed to get off her chest.
“I guess in a way I was looking for absolution through Will—just like I wanted it from Susan. For what happened with Gus, I mean. When Will said my name, I felt capable and wanted for the first time in a very long time.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
“It was a selfish reason to take the job. It shouldn’t have been about me.” She looked at him drowsily, worn out from the intense emotion of the day. “And I wanted him to come to me instead of Karina that day on the log bridge at the playground. I was competing with Will’s own mother. Do you understand how messed up that is? I’m an awful person, and I’m woefully overinvolved with your family. I should probably hand back my therapist badge before someone gets hurt.”
Rhys had to chuckle. “That’s your dreadful confession?”
“That’s it,” Andie confirmed in a small voice. As she spoke, her eyelids drooped to half-mast and then closed completely, as if she could finally rest now that her revelation was out. Her chest ceased its tumultuous rise and fall as her breathing settled into a regular rhythm.
Rhys looked over at her calm in sleep, and his heart soared. Overinvolved sounded pretty damn good to him right now. Will dozed in his car seat, and Rhys snatched glances at him through the rearview mirror, his chest stirring with an almost-painful fullness.
“What’s that?” he asked later, when Will was tucked in bed, and he came down to the den to find Andie sitting in front of the fireplace, the gingham-bound book she’d taken from the farmhouse sitting in her lap.
“It’s a photo album. Pictures from when I was a kid.”
“May I?”
He sat beside her, producing a bar of imported Cadbury Dairy Milk from behind his back, and shifted her so she sat nestled between his legs, leaning back against his chest. He broke off a row of four chocolate squares each to fortify them for what he expected was to be a bumpy trip down memory lane.
Andie held the album and began to turn the pages. She sat still and solemn as the images from her past appeared in sequence, tears occasionally leaking from under her lashes. There were photos of her as a baby, large-eyed and serious. One showed her as an infant cradled in the crook of her father’s arm while her mother stood with the older girls lined up in front of her, her hands on the shoulders of a russet-haired preschool-age child who could only be Jess.
Jim Tilly was tall, clean-cut, and imposing, not quite the image of the dissolute man Rhys had imagined from Andie’s description. Those images came later, the man’s eyes receding into puffy pouches of flesh, his mouth settling into a mean-spirited downward tilt on one side.
There was a photo of Andie at around age five, her hair in braids, an oversize backpack hooked over her skinny shoulders as she held Jess’s hand—probably on her first day of school. She was a soul-crushingly beautiful child, her eyes uncertain, her blouse half-untucked, and her skirt slightly askew.
At some point, she’d clearly been given her own camera, as the album was loaded with slanted, slightly fuzzy shots of horses, and many photos of a happy toddler with cropped chestnut-colored hair and a spray of freckles across his nose. Gus. There he was dressed up in his best for a family gathering, laughing as he threw bread crumbs to ducks in a pond, and running around the Tilly’s yard in just a diaper. Another photo showed him, slightly taller and slimmer, turning to look over his shoulder as he peed into a deflated wading pool, an expression of pure, wicked glee on his face. Probably his last summer, Rhys guessed, his heart plummeting. Within a year, Will would take on that longer shape, losing his toddler squatness.
“He was a cheeky kid,” he observed with a melancholy laugh.
“Yes,” Andie agreed. “He was a handful.” She seemed to grow stronger as she told Rhys about Gus, about his fierce affection and his curiosity, and about the bond they’d shared as the two youngest children of the family, often left to their own devices as the relationship between their parents deteriorated, and the older girls found refuge in clubs, sports, and boys. Gus had been Andie’s pint-size sidekick, shadowing her everywhere. Many preteen girls might have chafed at the constant demands of an adoring younger brother, but Rhys heard delight kindle in her voice as she described small adventures and run-of-the-mill childhood mishaps.
“He would have been twenty-one this month,” Andie said, raising a hand to wipe her cheek. “He would have been tall . . . and funny. I’m sure he would have been funny. He always used to crack me up.”
Rhys pressed a kiss to the back of her neck and looked on with interest as she turned the remainder of the pages. The photos of her after age eleven were fewer. It would not have been a time she was keen to document. There were a few photos of her in her teens, looking miserable and ill at ease. In one image she looked almost anemic, her eyes bleak, the color leached from her lips. Her hair was so lush by contrast it appeared to have stolen her vitality, draining the life and joy out of her to feed its own dark profusion. Sadness wended through his veins.
“Enough of that,” she declared uncomfortably, flipping forward to graduation photos of both Jess and her.
At Jess’s graduation, Susan, Louisa, and Rose clustered around, dressed to the nines and smiling proudly. Andie was probably behind the camera, he guessed. At Andie’s graduation ceremonies, for both her bachelor’s and master’s, there was only Jess. His parents had flown all the way from Wales to see him get his doctorate from MIT, he reflected.
His whole body smarted with outrage on her behalf. He wanted to correct the injustice done to her, right the imbalance in the universe, but—as the day had shown—wanting it would not make it so. All he could do was love her and move forward with her, helping her find new joys to crowd out the old sorrows.
He was in love with her, and he ached to tell her, to kiss the words into her skin, but it felt wrong to announce his feelings when she was still working through the shock of her break with her mother. He wanted the moment to be perfect, memorable, not just another emotional ambush on a day that had been packed with them. He hugged her close, dreaming. Waiting.