I sat up and squeezed myself behind him, sliding my arms around him, pressing my cheek between his shoulder blades, and held on.
He went still. Then, by degrees, he relaxed against me. His hands came up and closed over mine and held them to his chest, and under them his heart was going too fast.
We stayed like that a long time. Not saying anything.
Julian carried everyone. His sister, his brothers, the boys, the label, me. He got there first, every time, for everybody. Sitting there with my arms around a man who guarded his own heartbeat like it was something that could be used against him, I asked myself: Who did that for him?
“Better?” I said into his back.
His hands tightened over mine. “Yeah. Thank you.”
He turned in my arms and kissed me, still holding the last of it back.
Eighteen years he’d driven them out there and stood at the edge of it. I didn’t have the first idea how to walk a man across a distance like that without sending him running the other way.
But I was going to try.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When your mother died.” I kept my voice even. “How did you get through it?”
“We all dealt with it our own ways.”
“I’m not asking how the family dealt with it. I mean how didyou.”
“I just did. I was busy taking care of things.”
“You were nineteen, Julian. And you weretaking care of things?Who took care of you?”
“Where is this going?” He turned to face me, and I should have read the set of his shoulders and let it go. I didn’t.
“You think there’s a problem? It’s been eighteen years,” he said. “If there was a problem, I think it would’ve shown itself by now.”
“Maybe it has.”
He stared at me. “Meaning?”
“Meaning you’ve driven your family to your mother’s grave for eighteen years and stand at the car.”
His face changed and he shook his head. “Simone.”
I kept going, because I’d started and I didn’t know how to stop. “There’s a piano in your house you keep covered like it isn’t there, and an amazing voice you swallow down like it doesn’t exist. You talk about your family’s grief from the outside.They, them.As if you aren’t a direct part of that. Probably more direct than anyone else.”
“You’ve been paying a lot of attention. Taking notes?” he said sarcastically.
My heart started racing. “I’m not trying to catch you at something, Julian. I just see a man who carries every single one of us and won’t set any of it down. It scares me. For you.”
“I don’t need to be worried about. I’m good. I’ve been good. And I don’t need taking care of.”
“Everybody does. Especially the ones who’ve decided they’re the only ones who don’t. Ask me how I know?”
He went quiet, and I felt the whole thing tilting toward a place I couldn’t see the bottom of, and instead of stepping back from the edge I walked straight off it.
“What about your father?”
He went completely rigid in a way I’d never seen on him.
