“Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
“What else am I supposed to say?”Rip. Toss. Burn.“I believed her. I believed everything.”
“She was good.”
“No,” Daniel snapped, the first flicker of himself. “I believedeverything.”
“About what?”
“Love.”
“Believing in love is not a bad thing.”
Tell that to my heart.
“You can’t let one bad rap ruin your life. You just…” She struggled for words. The sweet, sappy shit was not Angie’s strong suit. If he had been in any kind of mood to think about anyone but himself, he would have been touched by the fact she tried at all. “Bet on the wrong horse.”
She wasn’t a horse. She was a woman. A beautiful woman he thought he was going to be truly, madly, deeply in love with. The one in whom he placed his every hope and trust and was rewarded with a wasted month and a pile of ash-burned love ditties.
“If you’re going to be optimistic, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“But—”
“You can sit here in silence or you can go,”Rip. Rip. Rip. Toss. Burn. “Your call.”
Angie shoved her hands in her pockets and dug her heels into the soft ground. She entertained herself by looking between the fires and her friend for all of seventy seconds before her patience wore out.
“I heard you canceled your trip to London. To sing for Icon. Are you sure you want to do that?”
He had. And he was.
“I thought we discussed silence,” Daniel intoned.
“Why’d you do it?”
He gave up ripping individual pages and tossed the entire notebook into the flames. The fake leather binding melted in the heat.
“I don’t think I really like music anymore.”
…
Since that day in her father’s office, Sam wandered the halls of Ashbrooke with all the life of a half-awake ghost. She did a few things that the living would do—asked her family to start calling her Samantha instead of Sam, threw out all of her Animos stuff—but beyond that, she pursued the motions of existence (school, showers, even a meal or two when she wasn’t sick to her stomach with herself) without any of its spark, any of its joy. It was hard to see the point. Daniel showed her so much of what life could be. She couldn’t look at something as simple as a record player without hurtling back to the worst night of her life.
And if someone had told her it would be her father who would snap her out of her misery, she would have laughed in their face. Since losing Daniel, he’d been more of a father than he’d ever been, though the bar was so low as to mean very little.
One afternoon, Samantha was flopped on a sitting room settee, scanning blindly through a gossip magazine stolen from Mrs. Long’s office when the old man strode in, dressed like a cartoon version of a British lord. With a red hunting coat and one of those pith helmets made famous by every colonial army ever, he had one rifle slung over either shoulder, intentionally broken at the loading chamber for easier transport. Sam might have laughed if she felt like laughing.
“All right, get up.” He nodded to her.
“I’m busy.”
“No, you’re not. We’re going shooting.”
Samantha raised an eyebrow at him over the edge of her magazine.
“Isn’t it illegal to own guns in the UK?” she asked.
“It’s legal if they’re licensed.”
