A muscle ticks in Sullivan’s cheek, and he purses his lips, his eyes holding mine like a penetrating spotlight. I can see why the Beaufort Diamond staff shit themselves when he isn’t happy about something. Jenson’s enjoyed telling me a tale or two about fainting employees and ones who throw up just knowing my brother has called a meeting.
He’s unnervingly calm in his Tom Ford suit, eyes like lasers, pinned on me. But he’s also my brother, so he doesn’t intimidate me no matter how much the look he’s giving me might make any other person wither on the spot.
I hold his eyes, arching a brow in challenge.
“Suit yourself,” he says finally. “See you later.”
He turns and walks off, and my eyes drop to my fingers and the tremble in them as I close the door behind him, securing the bolt in place.
Two weeks later
“You doing all right, Sunshine?”
I look up from the bridal magazine I’ve been hopelessly trying to concentrate on in my father’s kitchen. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Uncle Mal slips onto the bar stool next to me, a soft chuckle deepening the creases at the corners of his eyes. Before my mother died, they were signs of a lifetime of laughter and happy memories, worn with pride on his face. But after he lost his sister, grief turned them into deep shadows created by the loss of the light she brought into his world. He took their loss hard. I worry about him more than he’d want me to. He has us, we’re all family. And he has his wife, Trudy, although they never had their own children.
But some days, he seems more lost than any of us.
“Did you and Dad get the work done you wanted to?” I ask.
“Yeah. Just going over some things that Ade brought up on my visit. Your father’s finishing up in his office,” he says, running a hand around his jaw as he stares into space.
Ade is Beaufort Diamonds contact in Botswana who manages the mining operations when Uncle Mal isn’t there. And seeing as Sullivan is on another trip again today—LA this time—and won’t be back until late, he’s been updating my father on his last business trip.
“Okay,” I say, abandoning the magazine.
I came over to discuss planning details with Halliday. We managed to get a lot discussed until pregnancy tiredness wonover and she took herself off to have a nap. I was about to head home, but Monty decided to join her. He likes to lay his head by her stomach. Halliday says he does it when they mind him for me. It’s as if he’s already protective over the new addition to the Beaufort gang.
“It’ll be strange all of us going back there together,” Uncle Mal says.
I follow his gaze to the open magazine and the article on beach weddings. “It will,” I agree.
It’ll be the first time since the accident that we’ll all be near Cape Town together. Dad spent a lot of time there to begin with. And Sullivan went over with him a couple of times, more to try to talk him into coming home, I think. Which he did eventually.
But I haven’t been back since.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of them,” Mal says quietly.
“Yeah.” My throat thickens. “Me too.”
I close the magazine, my fingers still trembling, the way they have been for the past two and a half weeks.
Calloused fingers close around mine until they stop shaking. “It’s not easy, losing people you love,” Uncle Mal says.
“No,” I whisper, the weight of his hand on mine bringing some comfort. “It’s not.”
Before I can stop it, a tear slips free. It runs down my nose and drips off, leaving a wet splodge on the glossy cover of the magazine. The smiling bride hit by it seems unbothered, her smile still stretching up to her ears like a taunt.
A reminder of what happiness looks and feels like.
I swipe the tear off her face, but it’s quickly replaced by another one.
“If we fall in love, then does that mean we have to climb our way out of it once that person is gone?”
My uncle pats my hand and sighs. “I don’t think you ever get out of it, Sinclair. But as much as it hurts, imagine feeling nothing at all.”
“I think nothing would be my preference,” I reply.
