She thought about the text from her mother and the silence from her father. She didn’t usually think too much about it—she’d long since accepted that it was how it was—but maybe it was playing on her mind this time. Maybe that was what was wrong.

“Here.” Zac handed her a mug of hot tea, and she took it gratefully, her fingers brushing briefly against his.

“Thanks.”

Like her, he’d showered and changed and now he wore jeans and a heavy, ribbed sweater. His jaw was dark with stubble, his hair a little messy where he’d left it to dry naturally.

“To us.” He tapped his mug against hers in a toast, and his smile was slow and easy. “We have to keep her alive for one more day.”

She laughed, because he’d echoed her exact thoughts, and as they exchanged a look of understanding, finally it came to her. The reason she was feeling all these things.

It had nothing to do with the place. Nothing to do with her parents.

And everything to do with this man.

She’d always believed she was in control of her emotions. She’d worked hard at it and had always thought her protective shield was impenetrable. And now she was forced to face the most frightening truth of all.

When it came to Zac, she wasn’t in control at all.

13

Christy

The men Christy had dated before Seb had all been the same type. They were doctors, lawyers, or they worked ridiculous hours in finance. Men who took her to the theater or for dinner in restaurants they’d read about in a review. Men who had a clear idea of what they wanted from life and followed a path that had been trodden by many before them. Men she could take home to meet her mother, knowing Elizabeth would approve. She’d floated through those evenings, her brain unengaged, her feelings neutral. There was nothing particularly wrong with those men, but there was nothing particularly right with them, either. Sometimes she’d thought to herself, Is this it, is this all it is? But then she’d realized that the answer to that might be scary or depressing so she stopped asking herself the question. She’d discovered that when something made her uncomfortable it was best ignored. That was what her mother did, and it had worked well for her. Never had that approach been more in evidence than when her father died.

Christy had been experimenting with gouache and pastels in an art class when she was summoned to the school office. Her mother had been sitting there, white-faced and dry-eyed, waiting to take her home. Her father’s heart had decided it was tired of beating. He was dead. It was a week after her tenth birthday. A week after her father, who she adored, had told her she could do anything she wanted in life. Christy had only just begun to consider what that might be.

Even now when she thought about that day—and she tried hard not to because frankly it all felt like too much to handle—what she remembered wasn’t the words or the sympathetic expression on her teacher’s face, but the way her mother had taken her home and scrubbed at the blue smudges of paint on her fingers, as if cleaning them would solve everything. As if the stains on her skin were the problem and not the absence of the person they both loved most in the world. It had taken years for her to understand that her mother’s way of coping with the big things in life was to focus on the small things. By the time you’d made beds, peeled potatoes, cleaned, dusted, shopped and ironed, there was no room for reflection. And if you made a list, you didn’t ever find yourself with a terrifying moment of emptiness. The longer the list, the less likely you were to find yourself with a gap in activities. A gap, she’d discovered, was a grief trap ready to snap its jaws closed.