“I love you, Angel,” he whispers, pressing kiss after kiss to my lips. “I love you, I love you,I love you.”
I wrap my arms around his neck as I tell him, voice choked, “I love you, too, Dillon, and I can’t wait to spend forever with you.”
Epilogue 2
Dillon
Three years later
Overhead, the cry of gulls fills the air, a flock of them circling the water where the waves gently break against the pilings of the wharf. The wind picks up, making the wood creak under our feet and biting against any skin it finds. It’s an overcast day, the fog having lifted earlier, but the dark clouds threaten to let loose their rain at any moment.
Mom leans against my side, her attention out over the ocean. A small smile plays around her mouth, but does nothing to lessen the lines of grief etched into her skin. It’s been a year now. I know they’re never going to go away—a visible mark of the pain she always carries with her.
“I don’t understand why you and Charlie love coming out here in winter,” she murmurs, snuggling deeper into her red wool coat. It was a birthday gift from Charlie two years ago, and it’s the only coat Mom ever wears. Charlie’s started looking for another one for when this one gets too worn. My wife doesn’t realize that it’s not the coat that my mother loves.
It’s the fact that she bought it for her.
Charlie’s parents never came around after she left theirhouse for the final time and made good on their promise to disown her. The only person Charlie still speaks to is Kayla, but even that relationship is tenuous. Kayla believes that Charlie should have just given in to the expectations of her parents. Charlie believes Kayla is a product ofherparents and that, one day, she’ll be forced to grow up.
I wrap my arm around my mom’s shoulders, pulling her more firmly against me. “It’s quiet.” There’s only a handful of other people braving the weather today, and none of them are anywhere near us. “Charlie says she feels like she can think out here.”
“The wind is like ice picks,” Mom complains, her shoulder digging into my ribs as she pushes into me, trying to steal my body heat. “I’m sure she’d think better next to a fireplace.”
I stifle a smile. Mom’s all heart, and she’s terrible at hiding it. She was the first one to jump on the idea of coming here when Charlie suggested it this morning.
“You’ll live,” I tell her. A laugh hits the air, carefree and happy. It pulls my attention to the end of the wharf, where my wife stands, bundled into her own coat, and a green scarf wrapped around her neck—a gift from my mother to her, and one that matches her eyes perfectly. She wore her light brown hair down today, and the wind is whipping it around her head.
I watch her, eyes narrowing as she leans over the wooden railing that lines the edge of the wharf, pointing at something in the water.
Gran is standing a step behind Charlie, her white brows drawing together as she firmly shakes her head, either unable to see what Charlie’s pointing at or refusing to get any closer.
I don’t blame her. This wharf is one that looks like themaintenance has been neglected, and the railing looks warped after years of being battered by wind and sea. My abdomen tenses as Charlie leans even further over, putting a lot of trust in the hold of rotting wood. My fingers dig into Mom’s arm, and she looks at me with a frown.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, following my gaze and huffing out a laugh. “She’s fine, Dillon.”
I don’t breathe until Charlie shifts away from the railing, my shoulders lowering a fraction as a sigh of relief leaves me. Her mouth moves a mile a minute as she chats to Gran, turning to the side to face her. My eyes drop, tracing over her form and to where the swell of her belly pushes out against her navy coat, the buttons straining.
“Can’t believe my baby is going to be a daddy,” Mom says, her soft eyes on Charlie as well, her expression filled with so much love that my breath catches. “Only three weeks to go.”
My throat is tight, trapping my words. I force them out with a quiet rasp the breeze tries to steal. “I worry sometimes.”
My mom hears me, eyes meeting mine with an understanding that grabs my lungs in a stranglehold. “You’re not him,” she whispers. It’s not the first time she and Gran have worked at convincing me, but the fear is rooted deep. “Your dad was a broken man, and he stayed that way until the day he died.”
Thirteen months ago, Mom was having dinner at Gran’s place with Charlie and me. It had become a new family tradition for us every week, but my father was never invited—something Gran and I never relented on.
While he was at home alone that night, he had a stroke, and he was gone by the time my mother got home. It’s aburden of guilt she lives with every day, believing that if she had made a different choice, Dad might have survived.
The months after his funeral were dark, especially when Mom turned her guilt and self-hatred on my grandmother. After several months of bitterness and anger, I was the one to step in and remind her that if my father had been at dinner that night, Charlie and I wouldn’t have been.
I would have put up with Dad’s behavior for my mother, but I was never going to subject Charlie to it. Not after everything she had been through. My wife spent years being beaten down, and she came up stronger for it. I was never going to ask her to subject herself to that kind of toxicity again, even from my father. She deserved to be surrounded by good and nothing else.
Mom fought back, desperate for someone to blame to absolve herself—even though it wasn’t her fault, either—but I refused to let her look back on Dad’s life with rose-colored glasses.
I wouldn’t let her change the narrative that he was a resentful, hate-filled man—one who had left invisible marks all over our family.
My mother misses him, I think. As nasty as my father was to her, there was a large part of her that loved him. Libby would say she wastrainedto love him, but either way, grief is grief. I won’t begrudge her that, even if I don’t let her hide from the truth.
“I almost became him,” I remind Mom now. “I was…I’ve never forgotten the words I spewed at Charlie all those years ago.”
