Asher simply took a seat at the other end of the breakfast bar and waited.
I wanted to talk to Asher, but I found myself hesitant to tell him any of the details of what had happened with Lauren.
Sharing personal things that she’d shared with me just didn’t feel right.
I took another swig of my beer as my eyes landed on the portrait of my mother in Asher’s living room.
He’d had the likeness painted from an old photo.
I’d been just shy of six years old the last time I’d seen my mother.
I had snippets of memories with her, but Asher remembered her better than I did.
“She’d want you to be happy,” my brother said as he recognized what I was looking at. “That was all she ever wanted. She was a woman who believed every one of those fairy tales that she tried to convince us could happen in real life. Right up until the time that she couldn’t anymore.”
I vaguely remembered some of those fairy tales.
And then one day, my mother had just…vanished.
Asher and I had come home from school one day, and my mother wasn’t there to greet us with hugs and another fairy tale story.
My father had told us that our mom was a whore and that she’d run off with another man.
I was probably a little too young to understand what a whore was and why my mother was supposedly missing, but Asher had never believed my asshole father.
My brother had spent the majority of his adult life looking for her, and we were still continuing that search today.
“Any luck with the latest search?” I asked Asher.
He shook his head. “Nothing yet. I’m not giving up, but nothing has panned out.”
Christ!I wanted to find my mother just as much as Asher did, not only for her sake, but also for my older brother’s.
Asher was haunted by the past, and I knew he’d never be content until he found my mother.
We hadn’t been able to start a significant search until we were adults, and every avenue we’d pursued since then had come up empty.
“Have you ever thought about talking to Millie?” I asked Asher. “I know that our father and our uncle didn’t really talk, but Mom got along with Millie, right?”
“They didn’t dislike each other,” Asher confirmed. “But I don’t think they got to talk very often.”
“But Millie saw the relationship as an adult,” I reasoned. “Maybe she talked to Mom more than we think. She might have some insight about what happened. Do you want me to ask her?”
It was unlikely that Asher was ever going to go near the family, so asking him to approach our aunt was probably pretty useless.
“It couldn’t hurt, I suppose,” Asher agreed reluctantly.
I knew that Asher didn’t have any issues with Millie.
He was probably just hesitant to stir up more gossip about our family history.
“Are you ever going to speak to any of them?” I asked. “For what it’s worth, they never did anything to hurt us. Millie and our uncle actually tried to help us. They didn’t know what was really going on, and our cousins were just kids like we were. I think it bothers Aunt Millie that you keep refusing to talk to her when she tries to visit your place.”
“We talked a little last week,” he said unhappily. “And then she brought a pie this morning. I took it. She’s stubborn. She makes it almost impossible to ignore her.”
I gaped at my older brother. “You actually spoke to her?”
“She caught me out at the barn with the horses. I couldn’t just walk by her. I can avoid going to the door, but I could hardly bowl over an older woman who’s standing right in front of me.”
