He showed me to my suite and gave me a literal minute to change clothes before announcing we had "things to talk about with everyone else." A girl couldn't even wash the grime of air travel off her face before appearing in front of the family tribunal.
He led me outside to a sprawling patio area, and I had no idea I'd missed this side of the Atlantic until I felt the sea breeze on my skin. I didn't get much time to enjoy it, though. I was immediately slammed with six hundred percent more family than I knew how to swallow.
The upside to living the nomad's life—or downside, depending on your vantage point—was that I only consumed my family in bits and pieces. An email here, a video chat there, and then a month of silence and self-preservation. But that wasn't how this weekend was going to go.
Riley was a grown-ass man now, and a fucking enormous one at that. He hugged me tight enough to steal my breath and promised we'd get through this. I wasn't sure which "this" he had in mind, but I wasn't turning down the offer.
Sam belonged on the cover ofGQ, and I told him as much. It took him all of three minutes to get me on board with a post-wedding camping trip to Vermont. He agreed to hike the Quechee Gorge—one of New England's oldest and oddest geological formations—and I was sold. Mesozoic mafic dikes and Vermont air were my soul food.
Matt was smitten. He was overflowing with so much love and happiness that I could've scooped some of it off him and smeared it all over myself. I didn't, of course. Love and happiness would've had me breaking out in hives.
His fiancée, Lauren, was the human equivalent of a birthday cake. She was sweet and cheerful, but more than that, she made people feel special. I wore the Really Fucking Jaded crown day in and day out, but five minutes with this lady and I was as smitten as Matt. Her family was the textbook definition of Good, Wholesome People complete with the bubbly mom, stern-but-supportive dad, and a set of Navy SEAL brothers. Her father even had a spanky nickname for himself. The Commodore. How those nice people wound up with us was a question for the cosmos.
Matt's friend, Nick—the marathon buddy I'd been hearing about forages—was tall, dark, and charming. Dr. Acevedo was southern—Texan, according to Matt's mentions of him—but he said my name with a flood of Spanish that had therrolling for days. That my brother had systemically failed to inform me his Latin friend was hotter than the Kilauea lava field was troubling.
And my sister…She was still holding it all together with one hand and carrying the weight of the world in the other. As if I was Medusa, capable of turning anyone who met my monstrous gaze into stone, Shannon eluded me. She was careful to sit on the opposite end of the patio when Patrick gathered us together, and she never once glanced my way.
There was something complicated about sisters, and complicated didn't scratch the surface with me and Shannon. I wasn't ready to wade into that complication either. Not at all.
"Chill out," Riley murmured as he wedged in beside me on the wicker loveseat. "If this shit gets too heavy, just ask Patrick about his apprentice and I guarantee everyone will forgetallabout you and Shannon."
"You're wrong," I said under my breath. A waiter appeared, eager to take my drink order. I waved him off. "He wants to have this out. Right here, right now. It's like he won't sign off on Matt getting married until I lift the curse. He's got his 'let's get to the bottom of this' speech all ready. Just look at him."
Patrick was pacing, a small cardboard box tucked under his arm.
"Nope," Riley said. "That's not even on his top ten list right now."
"I don't know," I said, pinching my inner thigh. The pain pulled the stress of this moment out of focus, and it helped. Even if only for a minute.
"I do," Riley said. "Matt instituted a strict no-fly zone for the weekend, and those two"—he tipped his head back toward the bar with a pointed glance at Lauren's brothers, Will and Wes—"are responsible for enforcing it at all costs. The one with the beard is on Shannon duty, and the other one's on you. I believe they've been authorized to hog-tie you both if you so much as cough in the wrong direction."
"Oh, fantastic," I muttered. I'd be offended by the babysitting detail if it weren't so damned appropriate. My years were few but my shameful moments of extraordinary carelessness were many.
"Shush," Riley admonished, jerking his chin toward Patrick. "Optimus wants to talk now."
This time, Riley was right. Instead of calling an end to the feud, Patrick opted to tell us about a haunted house. This wasn't any old home, heavy with lingering souls. It was a place that sucked the innocence from my skin and stripped the optimism from my marrow. It was dark corners, steep staircases, hidden passageways, and all of those things reverberated with breath-stealing terror.
But for once, this old home wasn't handing down a beating.
In his work to prepare our childhood home for sale, Patrick and his apprentice Andy discovered a vault built between the walls. All the things we thought Angus had destroyed—my mother's clothes and journals, family photos and handmade baby blankets—were lovingly preserved. For nearly twenty-five years, we'd believed Angus's grief and resentment drove him to obliterate every trace of my mother, but now it seemed the old sap had built a shrine instead.
That was Angus's style: absolutely fucking demented, with a side of melancholy.
So here I was, for once surrounded by remnants of my mother. Her jewelry, her scrapbooks, her scarves.Her. She was here, and she was real. My siblings knew her, in their own ways, and the memories I had of her were borrowed from them. For years, those ill-fitting hand-me-downs were my best and only options.
But then Sam passed me a small cherrywood jewelry box, and I found myself staring at a necklace that I'd seen only in partially formed recollections that seemed more imagination than reality. The small silver pendant warmed between my fingers, and I stared directly at Shannon, willing her to meet my gaze.
It was Paris all over again.
Everything had memories, everything was charged with knowledge of that which had come before and before and before, but I didn't know that deep in my bones until I was poking around a Parisian drugstore two years ago. I was there for a conference but I also needed tampons, and when I walked through the doors, I was hit with a scent that unearthed a lifetime of memories. It was rosewater, delicate and fresh and overwhelming in an unexplainably-emotional-in-a-Parisian-drugstore kind of way.
In that moment, Iunderstoodsomething but I couldn't explain it. I bought a few bottles and spritzed it on daily, racking my brain for why it fucking mattered, but it took an entire year to realize it was my mother. Rosewater was the only thing that I remembered about her but with that one memory unlocked, I hadsomething,and that was a fuck-ton more than the nothing I'd been operating with since she died. That something brought back the feel of her arms holding me tight, her voice in my ear, and her necklace—the one with the tiny compass pendant—between my fingers.
I'd cried—really cried—for the first time in years. We lost her when I was a toddler, but it took two decades for me to meet her, and then mourn her.
Now, with her necklace in my hands and rosewater in my lungs, and my sister's refusal to look at me and tell me that I was allowed to feel this much relief and loss at once, I was crumbling. It was overpowering—all of this was overpowering, everything—and I was desperate for some of the distance I'd clung to since leaving home all those years ago.
And I was taking this necklace with me.
