I knew Bram, knew he still had trouble expressing his emotions. He was working on it — Maeve was helping — but he still had a tendency to isolate himself when what he really needed was to be surrounded by people who cared about him.
“I’ll make you another coffee,” Maeve said.
I laughed. ”You don’t have to wait on me.”
I’d had a full plate and cup ever since we got to the loft and I hadn’t had to get up once.
“It’s my way of helping,” she said. “Coffee and food.”
I took in the spread on the kitchen island: three kinds of gourmet sandwiches, a vegetable tray with an amazing Greek dip, a fruit tray with an even better marshmallow and cream cheese dip (I’d asked for the recipe), several kinds of potato chips, and a giant pot of butternut squash soup that tasted a lot better than it sounded.
And if that wasn’t enough to make me unfasten the top button of my jeans, there were plates of homemade cookies and brownies, plus an entire chocolate cake Maeve had whipped up right before my eyes.
“You definitely know coffee and food,” I said. “Be right back.”
It was one of the things I liked about Maeve: she let me have my relationship with Bram. She was always there for him, but she was there for him in a way I couldn’t be and I think she knew there were unique ways I could be there for him too.
Bram and I shared history. Shared trauma. Shared DNA.
No one knew what we’d been through quite like us.
I found him upstairs in the bedroom he shared with Maeve, and sometimes Poe and Remy, I guessed?
It wasn’t as weird as I’d thought it was before I fell in love with the Hawks.
Bram was sitting on the bed, looking at a stack of pictures that had obviously come from one of the open boxes on the floor.
“Hey,” I said, pushing the door open. “You okay?”
“I’m good.” He hesitated. “I just…”
I sat next to him on the bed. “It’s a lot.
He nodded. “I’m so fucking mad at myself, Cass.”
I frowned. “Mad at yourself? But… why?”
“If I hadn’t been so blind, so stubborn, we might have found all this years ago. And I only have myself to blame because you tried to tell me.”
“There’s no blame,” I said. “You were put in a shitty situation. I honestly can’t imagine what it must have been like for you at nineteen, recovering from the crash and Mom and Dad’s deaths and then having to suddenly be a parent to me. No one in the world is going to blame you for not having room to chase down what was really no more than a hunch.”
There was sorrow in his eyes when he turned to look at me. “Yeah, but it was your hunch, Cass. That should have been enough.”
I took his big hand, tried to remember when it had been smaller, back when everything had been okay and nothing bad had happened to us yet.
“It’s okay. You’re with me now. That’s what matters.”
He returned his gaze to the picture and I looked over at the image in his hand.
I was about four in the photo so Bram must have been around twelve. I was on his lap on a swing, his feet dug into the dirt, mine dangling over his knees. We were grinning into the camera and holding onto the swing’s chain, although Bram with only one hand, his other arm wrapped around my waist to keep me from falling.
“I don’t remember this,” Bram said. “Do you?”
“Not really.” I studied the picture. “I don’t remember a lot of things but I’m glad we have pictures to prove they were real.”
“Me too,” he said.
“You know what I do remember?”
