Bree frowned. “What do you mean?”
Aunt Di sighed. “We have made mistakes, but at the time, we thought it was the best thing for both you and your father.”
“What mistakes?”
“I think we should have sent you home with Garlain,” Aunt Di said. “If we did, he might have been better able to cope with the loss of your mother. He would have had you to live for and to love.”
Bree kinked her head to the side. “Couldn’t you just go back and send me with him?”
“No.” Uncle Mark glanced at Aunt Di. “I don’t think it was a mistake to keep you with us. Your father was too grief stricken to care for you then.”
“Then how about you go back in time and send me when he’s had time to come to terms with Mom’s passing. What? About a year after?”
Mark shook his head. “We went back to check on him and even after what was a year later to Garlain, he was still in no fit shape to care for a child.”
“Hey, that’s when I went there, a year after Dad returned there, but twenty-one years for me. That’s why I wanted to change the orbs’ settings. I thought it would be better to go back when Dad had aged another twenty-one years.”
“You can’t,” Uncle Mark said.
Bree clicked her tongue noisily against her teeth. “Why not?”
Uncle Mark grimaced. “As I said, your father wouldn’t have been fit to look after you then, and he still wasn’t even a year later.”
“The only thing we could think of is to have you fully grown before you met,” Aunt Di said. “We’re hoping you’ll be able to get through to him where we couldn’t.”
Horland came to Bree’s mind, and she ignored the quickening of her heart at the thought of him. Her aunt and uncle were playing with her life and while she saw their meddling was a good thing for her cousins, something about their demeanor told her something was wrong, something bad. “Are you telling me you’re trying to play matchmaker with me and Horland?”
“No,” Aunt Di said. “We don’t know where your relationship with him goes, it hasn’t happened yet, at least not for us.”
Bree plopped back onto the stool. “You know, you’re not making sense.”
Aunt Di stepped forward and sat on the stool next to Bree. “Sit down and we’ll tell you what we know.”
Bree slowly sat down and said, “All right then.”
“Like your uncle said, we did go back many times, but each time Garlain was in no mental state to look after a child. The last time was about fourteen months after your mother died.”
“He’d sunk low, Bree,” Uncle Mark said. “Lower than we thought was possible.”
Bree noted Aunt Di’s eyes tear up.
“How low?” Bree asked, scared to hear the answer but determined to know the truth.
Uncle Mark gave Aunt Di an encouraging look and said, “There’s no other way to say this, Bree. After your father had been back in his own time just over a year, he killed himself.”
“What?” Bree couldn’t comprehend how the laughing, loving man she knew could do such a thing. What about her? Didn’t he even think about her? Care for her feelings? She was about to ask why, but she knew why.He couldn’t live without Mom and he didn’t care about me.
Aunt Di grasped Bree’s hands in hers. “He did love you, Bree, he just couldn’t find his way out of his despair; he couldn’t find his way back to you.”
Bree understood how depression could change people, take them down to a place where they could see no way out, no way to end the pain within.
“How?” she whispered.
Mark stood alongside Aunt Di. “One day,” he said, “Garlain left the ruins and walked into the river. It was during a storm and the rain fell hard. The river raged and took him down to its depths.”
“Morla tried to save him,” Aunt Di said. “But she nearlydrowned herself and when she finally got to shore, he was gone.”
Mark cleared his throat. “The only way we hoped to fix everything was to wait until you were grown and send you back before he sank that low. We needed you to go back before he did anything, to make him see that life goes on.”
