“Your brother,” he echoes, setting his phone down on the desk behind him with a thud, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Yes. There must have been a mix-up, I thought that my family hired you to get me from the airport, but I guess they hired someone else and . . .” My words trail off under the weight of his full, undivided attention.
The charged moment stretches on between us as the rational half of my brain loses its edge to the half that is driven by the most basic of human instincts.
In the silence, I admire how his stubble perfectly accentuates his square jaw and imagine what it would be like to feel it against my skin. His eyes roam my face in return, but the awareness of his view compared to mine helps to sober the moment enough for me to clear my throat and finish my original thought.
“Why did you pick me up, anyway? And Val? I don’t remember airport pickups being in the itinerary.”
He considers my question for a moment, and when he speaks, his tight shoulders lower a bit. “Remember how I told you that my parents died six months ago, when we were talking in the car?”
I freeze at the unexpected nature of his answer but manage a solemn nod.
“They were driving too fast on a slick road less than a mile from here. When the storm rolled in, I asked Delaney for everyone’s phone number and arrival times to personally offer a ride, because I wanted to make sure everyone got here safely.”
The sorrow in his voice is painfully familiar. The loss of both of my parents makes facing each day feel nearly impossible, even after all this time. The thought of losing them both at the same time and so recently . . .
“What are you thinking?” he asks and dips his head to maintain our eye contact when I try to look away.
“Nothing,” I say, not wanting to use theI understandcard, because I always hated it when others used it with me.
“Tell me. Please?”
I swallow at his eagerness to hear what I, a complete stranger, am thinking, and feel terrible that I am not in a place right now to join the conversation that he so clearly wants to start.
Besides, our grief is not the same, because there’s no way this man is personally responsible for his parents’ deaths like I am for mine. I came here to try and put everything that holds me back from being in my future nephew’s life behind me, so rehashing it is the last thing I should do right now. So, I lie.
“It’s stupid, but I was thinking about Leah, one of the guests, and how she was complaining earlier that she didn’t get to ride with you from the airport.”
The way his face falls shoots a pang of guilt straight to my heart. Cursed Drew would jump in to try and fix his hurt feelings and be selfless enough to talk about our parents even though it’s not what’s best for her right now, but Epic Drew keeps a tight hold on things and simply suggests that I wait it out.
“Leah drove herself down from Jersey, so I didn’t reach out to offer,” Cameron says.
I nod at his explanation, and then the room falls silent again. A glance at the clock shows that I have less than thirty minutes toget ready for the wine tasting, and that I need to leave right now if there is any chance of me getting in a shower, but I find myself pointing a thumb over my shoulder towards the records instead. “Do you mind if I take a look?”
“Be my guest.” He takes a few tentative steps in my direction, but leaves a comfortable distance between us while I flip through a few displays.
It’s probably rude to shut down his attempt at making a genuine connection and then ask to look at his records, but I doubt I’ll get the chance again, so I selfishly dive in. It’ll only be a minute.
I recognize most of the albums, although the covers to his are in much better shape than the ones I have that are now collecting dust in boxes somewhere. When I was younger, my dad used to take Scott and me to shop at thrift stores for well-loved vinyl, which he always argued sounded better than the brand-new ones.
I loved our record hunts because we would celebrate a good find with a tub of ice cream and eat it straight out of the carton on the floor of our tiny apartment while the new record played. It was our family ritual for years, until the time I decided to surprise my dad for his fiftieth birthday with a rare record from a collector that was unopened, still in the plastic.
I’ll never forget how nervous he looked after he opened it, and we sat down with the tub of his favorite ice cream to listen. His nervousness made sense, though, when the needle met the unblemished record and Scott and I learned, contrary to what Dad always told us, that new records soundedexactlythe same as our used ones, if not better. Clearly, he told us that white lie because we couldn’t afford the luxury of new vinyl on a single income living in Los Angeles, and the truth of it only made me love him more for managing to bring so much magic into our lives on a tight budget. Treasure hunting was never quite thesame after that, and I hate that I ruined such a great tradition, even though it was completely unintentional.
Such is life, and such is my curse.
Just as I accept the resurgence of the memory as a fair punishment for being too selfish to talk to Cameron about his grief, I am pulled to a cubby that houses holiday albums. A bit of hope flickers inside of me as I flip through them to see if Cameron has a copy of my dad’s favorite one that we listened to every Christmas until the grooves practically wore out. I lost it somewhere while we were moving his stuff out of the old apartment after he died, and even though it’s mid-March, the idea of listening to it one more time is too tempting to pass up.
“Are you looking for a specific album?”
“Yes,” I say as I thumb through the last of the cardboard sleeves, and my heart sinks when I pass the last one. “But it doesn’t look like you have it.”
He frowns. “Which one? My mom was obsessed with collecting Christmas albums—”
The shrill beeps of a smoke detector in the distance interrupt his words and pull both our attentions towards the door. Cameron returns to his desk to grab his phone just as it speaks in a loud, robotic voice:Smoke detected in the kitchen.
Chapter eighteen
