She laughed in spite of her best efforts. “Yes, but he also says ‘the only easy day was yesterday.’” Her hand passed back and forth between my shoulder blades as she shook her head. “Today’s a difficult day, but you’re going to make it through. You need to let him go.”
Looking up, I studied Angus under the tangle of tubes and cables. “No, you know what I need to say to him? I need to say thank you. Thank you for being such an evil bastard. Thank you for leaving us to fend for ourselves. Thank you for destroying every good thing we ever knew because Mom’s death destroyed you. And you want to know why we took over the business? Because fuck you. Fuck you, for all of it. I’ll never understand how it was so easy for you to hate us, or why we were the enemy.”
Lauren squeezed my hand, and when she led me out, the rush of emotion that must have hit the others hit me. At once I felt relief, sorrow, hope, but not an ounce of loss. I may have always known we lost Angus along with my mother, but I didn’t realize it until stepping out of that room. We had been orphaned with a living ghost, and that haunting was finally over.
I glanced at Lauren—my force of nature. The warmth from her hand in mine only took the edge off the chill riding my bones, and I fell into her open arms.
“You can hold onto me as long as you need, Matthew. I’m not going anywhere.”
*
Angus died thirteenhours later with Nick and Lauren by his side.
It wasn’t more than twenty minutes after they insisted we leave for rest, fresh clothes, and food, and I imagine that was how Angus preferred it. There was a time when he loved us and looked upon us fondly, but that time ended decades ago, and even in death, I doubted he could see past his anger to remember it. He needed to be free of us to die, but I hated that he went with Lauren’s goodness surrounding him. She never said it but I knew she held his hand and spoke kind words as he passed, and stayed beside him until the orderlies wheeled him away, and he didn’t deserve that.
Somewhere in my foggy consciousness, I knew she did it for me—and Sam and Shannon, and Patrick and Riley, and even Erin—as much as she did it for Angus. She knew that, in a place far beneath our resentment and hurt, tiny slivers of us still cared about him, and she was taking this one for us.
I dropped to the sofa with a tumbler of whiskey and watched the Coast Guard boats patrolling the harbor. I shouldn’t have felt relief, but knowing Angus was gone left me lighter, and I could relax for the first time in years. The grief I experienced after saying goodbye—or fuck off, depending upon your interpretation—was brief and cathartic.
The wreckage he left in his wake was substantial, and I knew it would take years to put us back together but we knew all about restoration. We knew about picking up the pieces, brushing away the effects of time, and seeing things as they should be.
Lauren came to me, curled herself around me, and we watched in the hazy darkness between night and morning as the storm rolled in from the sea. I didn’t have to request her presence, she just knew I needed it. She didn’t say anything, and there was nothing to say that her loving touch didn’t already express.
There were versions of Lauren, probably too many to count, but she showed me every one without hesitation, and I knew her. I knew her heart and her mind and her love, and I knew that night at The Red Hat that she was rare and precious. And she knew me, all of me.
Despite every mathematical improbability, we had been waiting for each other. Passing each other in coffeehouses, on the streets of Beacon Hill, and on beaches of Cape Cod, waiting for the moment when our universes collided. Until she fell into my arms.
We belonged to each other.
We sat there for hours—maybe it was minutes, I couldn’t tell anymore—and she whispered, “Tell me what you need.”
Five words we knew so well, and right now they meant something else entirely.
I studied her eyes, looking for the flares of gold in the seas of green, and said, “Can I show you a few things?”
She nodded, and I grabbed the items I needed from my home office without giving myself a second of doubt.
“I’ve been drawing this house,” I said, settling onto the sofa with her on my lap and paging through my graphing notebook. “I started it a couple of months ago, and I have some variations here, but it’s the same house at its core. Here’s the great room and the kitchen. The library, the master bedroom.”
“This is remarkable, Matthew.” She touched her fingers to the paper, tracing the lines. “I thought you did this in a computer program. I didn’t know you did it by hand like this.”
“It’s how I learned. This was the one thing my father taught me: how to let the design move from my mind to my hand to the page.” The thought slammed into my chest, more as an unanticipated reminder than stunning grief, and I decided I was all right. Lauren was filling the empty space where Angus usually unloaded his venom, and I knew she’d get me through this. “I took it apart and rebuilt it a couple of times, and I put in a little roof garden, just because they make Sam happy.”
Lauren turned the pages, studying each design and feeling my pencil’s indentations on the paper. “Is this a project you’re working on?”
“No,” I said, resting my chin on her shoulder and letting my lips brush against her neck. “But I kept going back to it, over and over these past few months. Every time I made it a little different, adjustments here and there, but it was always the same house.”
She nodded thoughtfully, and I knew she was entertaining my ramblings with extreme patience. I hadn’t seen a single eye roll from her yet, and I wanted her to stop worrying that my father died tonight and argue with me again. I was finally free to live, and I wanted her alongside me for the journey.
“I realized this morning I’d been drawing it for you,” I said. “This is for you, and part of me has known that for months because it’s all the little things you like, the things you need. Built-in bookshelves, a claw-foot tub, a big kitchen island, plenty of windows in the master bedroom. This is yours. And mine, I hope. Some day.” Her eyebrows winged up, and I laughed, my first genuine laugh today. “It’s our house. The one I want to build you.”
She stared at the design for long, excruciating minutes, and when she finally glanced up, I saw that familiar grin, that naughty schoolteacher smile, and I could breathe again. “Is that all? I recall there being multiple items on your punch list, Mr. Walsh.”
“Do you remember how you came home with me after one kiss, Miss Halsted?”
And then she gave it to me: the eye roll I’d been craving for days. “I think there was more to the story than that, and I think it had something to do with your growls and panty-dropping stares.”
“So that’s a yes,” I laughed. “Do you remember how I asked you to marry me the next day?”
