I’d been terrified. Nothing in my life that was good had ever lasted. The only two people who’d ever loved me—my brother and his wife—were dead. My college degree, the security I’d had being a student, was over. I had no job, no prospects, a one-year-old niece, and I was alone. So, trusting that this would last, that we’d be safe and happy here, it was so flipping hard to do.
And accepting these people were doing this for me, a single parent, out of the goodness of their hearts? I’d been so sure no one in the world was like that. They all had ulterior motives. I hadn’t technically been wrong on that—there had been ulterior motives because as a pink-haired woman bounced through the door with a tall, tattooed man carrying a little girl in his arms behind her, I’d been offered a job.
Actually, offered was the wrong word—I’d been told I was starting my new job in the Piersville Police Department in a week, just as the woman, Tabby, had begun pulling stuff out of some of the boxes. Pink glasses, pink plastic glasses, kids’ plastic plates, and cutlery, a gorgeous dining set with a dark pink lattice effect across it, a cushion with a fairy embroidered on it. And then she’d started on the next bag and the next.
The whole thing had been overwhelming, but it was a chance to give Shanti the world, so I’d grabbed it with both hands and held the hell on for the ride.
Heidi had changed my life by telling me I was moving here as I’d sat suffocating in my hometown. But the people here had changed me.
I now knew kindness was a real thing, that love truly did exist. That there were people with good hearts out there. And that not everything came with a motive.
Shanti was safe and loved here, and that’s all I wanted. I loved her with every piece of my being, absolutely worshipped the ground she walked on, just like I had her daddy. He’d been my whole world, and when that’d been taken from me, she was all I’d had left.
And that’d all led me to this moment. Security surrounded me, but the vulnerability I’d been left with after losing the solid foundations having my brother had given me kept me off-balance.
Feeling another tear trickle slowly down my face, I clenched my hands to stop myself from reaching up and wiping it away. What was the point? Another one would just follow it in a second.
Today was one of the worst days of the year for me—the anniversary of the crash that’d killed Callum and Chastity. She’d only given birth to Shanti nineteen days before they’d died and was having problems with heavy bleeding at the time. Callum was driving her to the hospital to get checked over, and the police think she began hemorrhaging, and it’d likely distracted my brother from the road.
Because the rain was so heavy, he’d aquaplaned on the surface, losing control of the car, and hitting a heavy goods vehicle. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the details during the investigation and inquest. All I’d cared about was that neither of them had suffered, which they hadn’t.
Shanti had been in the back and had suffered a broken arm and some cuts and bruises, but on the whole, she’d been lucky.
I remembered answering the phone as I’d walked out of class and the officer on the other end explaining my brother and Chastity were gone. I don’t remember much after that, except that a friend had picked me up off the ground and had gotten a paper bag from one of the janitors who’d helped to get me breathing properly.
The pain… I remember the pain perfectly, and it was what was suffocating me again now.
That’d been a whole four years ago. It’d been one thousand, four hundred, and sixty-one days since my brother had been here, and I’d missed him every second of every hour of those days.
Dropping onto my back on the grass in my backyard, I focused on one star. It wasn’t the brightest, and it wasn’t the biggest. It just stuck out to me more than the others.
“I miss you, Cal. I miss you so much it feels like I can’t breathe. Shanti looks so much like you.”
Licking my lips and breathing through the tightness in my chest for a moment, I did my best to settle my emotions down, so I didn’t end up in the same state I had four years ago. Shanti was with my best friend tonight, but I needed to always keep it together so I could look after her.
When I had control back, I soldiered on.
“I know I said thank you for everything you did when we were little, all the times you held my hands and kept me safe, or when you managed to get us something to eat, but I have more to say it for.