‘Porn,’ I shouted as Callum walked in, his hair dusted with a light offering of snow. ‘I was looking at porn.’
His eyebrows reached new heights as he stood on the threshold, distracted enough by my desperate lie to let Albert scamper past him.
‘I’ll stop now.’ I patted the lid of my computer. ‘All done.’
I left Callum with an alarmed look on his face and raced through to the bedroom. I didn’t think he would snoop on my computer, but I opened it for long enough to close all the tabs before shoving it into my backpack.
I returned to the main room, hoping Callum would be content to continue our day like I hadn’t shouted something wildly inappropriate at him. I hadn’t thought anything could distract me from the lingering sadness of my search and the pulsing embarrassment afterwards, but I hadn’t accounted for the bag in Callum’s hand.
‘Hash browns?’ I rushed over and grabbed them. ‘You bought hash browns?’
Callum’s lips twitched. ‘Do you like them?’
‘I fucking love them. I worship them. My last meal will be a bucket of these guys.’ I tore open the packaging. ‘We have to cook them all. I’ve seen how much you eat, and I want a fair share.’
While I spread the delicious triangles of potato on abaking sheet, Callum turned on the oven and placed breaded chicken on a metal tray.
‘This all takes twenty-five minutes to cook.’ Callum slotted the wondrous food into the oven. ‘Think you can wait that long?’
I narrowed my eyes. Callum hadn’t been in contact with Lucas or my dad, so there was no way he could know I’d once tried to eat a frozen hash brown. In my defence, I’d just finished a hike and twenty-five minutes felt like a lifetime to a hungry teenage boy.
While our meal filled the cabin with saliva-inducing aromas, we made ourselves comfortable on the sofa in front of the fire. I looked over at Callum and underneath the distracting gorgeousness, it wasn’t difficult to see a man broken by what had happened to his family. It emanated from everything about him. The wary way he smiled. How he always waited for me to initiate a hug. The way he barely talked about himself and lived in the mountains all alone. Except for the goats. And me. For now.
I frowned. Bonnie’s insistence that discussing the house was off limits didn’t sit right. I could understand not wanting to go into a detailed explanation with a stranger, but there was something about how everyone reacted when I’d mentioned the house. Like they didn’t ever talk about it.
I shuffled to sit facing Callum. He looked up from the jeans he was repairing and gave me a soft smile.
‘You can talk about your dead family with me if you want to,’ I blurted out. Perfect. Exactly the way to broach this delicate subject. Gold star for Aster.
Callum’s smile fell. ‘What did Bonnie say?’
‘She didn’t say anything,’ I reassured him, sure that atany moment he would leap up from the sofa and flee. ‘And that might be the problem?’
Callum looked ridiculously lost, his eyes darting between mine like he was searching for something.
‘Will you let me explain?’ I held up my hands.
For a second, I thought he might say no. But then he set the needle down on top of the jeans and angled himself towards me. His face was a study of wariness, but he hadn’t shut me down. Which gave me hope I was on vaguely the right track.
‘I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, since it’s not something you drop into a casual conversation, but my mum died when I was twelve.’ I grasped my hands together on my lap. Unlike everyone at lunch, Callum tracked the movement before his eyes snapped back to mine. ‘It was sudden; she had a heart attack and died within minutes. And it totally sucked.’
Totally suckedwas a light way of putting it. My mum, who I’d believed capable of anything, was alive and laughing one minute, then absolutely and irrevocably gone the next.
‘At first, me and my dad didn’t talk about it much, or about her. It was too hard. We were too sad.’Sadalso didn’t encapsulate the horrible wrongness of those first days and weeks. ‘But months later, I got heartburn and freaked out. I thought I was dying too.’
Dad came home to find me writing my will. Since I wanted all my worldly possessions—which included a complete Lego Death Star—to go to Lucas, it didn’t amount to much.
‘After that, we talked about Mum a lot. All the time. And not just the good times. We talked about how horrible it was to see her lying cold in the hospital and how we hatedwatching her coffin lower into the ground. We talked about everything and instead of it making things harder, we became lighter. We could lift our heads and see a tiny bit of good in the world.’
I shrugged, easing the ache that always awakened in my chest when I shared about Mum. ‘Talking about her didn’t make the pain go away, but it made life better again. There wasn’t this horrible thing that had happened that we couldn’t speak about hanging over us.’
I looked into Callum’s eyes, their colour a dull brown as he sat frozen. ‘I might be overstepping and I’m sorry if I am, but from the reaction at lunch when I mentioned the abandoned house, it seems like Bonnie and her friends don’t talk about what happened. I wanted to let you know that if you wanted to talk to someone, I would be honoured to listen.’
Callum didn’t answer. He swallowed, then jerked when the oven timer went off.
My eyes widened and my mouth filled with saliva. ‘It’s hash brown time,’ I whispered.
Callum’s lips twitched, and we stood to serve up a meal fit for kings. I wondered if he would ever reply or if my offer would remain unacknowledged, but he rested his hand on my forearm before I could take my heaped plate back over to the sofa.
