Not that I expected much, but it’s cozy and uncluttered, and I even have my own fireplace. There are double doors across the room, a bed, a dresser, and a cushioned chair, everything done in woodsy colors leaving plenty of room to pace and spread out on the floor if I want to sit like I often do.
A yawn pulls at my mouth, and my eyes water a little.
“Towels are here,” Jake tells me from the hallway. “Let me know if you need anything.”
He steps back into the room, filling up the doorway, and I stand in the middle of the space.
“Is it okay?” he asks me.
I nod, murmuring, “It’s nice.”
I feel him watch me, and my muscles tighten. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
I glance up at him.
He quirks a smile. “We’ll change that.”
Good luck.
Jake grabs the door handle and starts to pull it closed.
“You hated my father.” I turn my eyes on him, stopping him. “Didn’t you?”
He straightens and stares at me.
“Won’t it be uncomfortable for you to have me here… Uncle Jake?”
If he hated my dad, won’t I remind him of him?
But his eyes on me turn piercing, and he says in an even tone, “I don’t see your father when I look at you, Tiernan.”
I still, not sure what that means or if it should make me feel better.
You look like your mother. He’d said at the airport that I looked like my mother. Did he see her when he looked at me, then? Was that what he meant?
His eyes darken, and I watch as he rubs his thumb across the inside of his hand before he balls it into a fist.
I’m rooted, my stomach falling a little.
“And you don’t have to call me uncle,” he says. “I’m not really anyway, right?”
But before I can answer, he clicks his tongue to call the dogs, they follow him out, and he pulls the door closed, leaving me alone.
I stand there, still, but the nerves under my skin fire. One phone call, a coach seat, and four states later, it finally occurs to me… I don’t know these people.
Tiernan
I yawn, the warm smell of fresh coffee drifting through my nostrils as I arch my back on the bed and stretch my body awake.
Damn. I slept like shit.
I reach over on the nightstand for my phone to see what time it is, but my hand doesn’t land on anything, just falls through the empty space.
What?
And that’s when I notice it. The roughness of the new sheets. The whine of the bed under my body. The pillow that’s not the feather one my neck is used to.
I blink my eyes awake, seeing the faint, morning light stream across the ceiling from where it spills in through the glass double doors in my room.
Not my room, actually.
I push up on my elbows, my head swimming and my eyelids barely able to stay open as I yawn again.
And it all hits me at once. What had happened. Where I am. How I ran away, because I was rash and I wasn’t thinking. The uncertainty that twisted my stomach a little, because nothing is familiar.
The way I don’t like this and how I’d forgotten I don’t like change.
The way he looked at me last night.
I train my ears, hearing the creak of tree branches bending with the breeze outside and how that breeze is getting caught in the chimney as it blows.
No distant chatter coming from my father’s office and the six flat screens he plays as he gets ready for his day. No entourage of stylists and assistants running up and down the stairs, getting my mother ready for hers, because she never leaves the house unless she’s in full hair and make-up.
No phones going off or landscapers with their mowers.
For a moment, I’m homesick. Unbidden images drift through my head. Them lying on cold, metal slabs right now. Being slid into cold lockers. My father’s skin blue, and my mother’s hair wet and make-up gone. Everything they were—everything the world would recognize—now gone.
I hold there, frozen and waiting for the burn in my eyes to come. The sting of tears. The pain in my throat.
Wanting the tears to come.
Wishing they would come.
But they don’t. And that worries me more than my parents’ death. There’s a name for people who lack remorse. People who can’t empathize. People who demonstrate strong anti-social attitudes.
I’m not a sociopath. I mean, I cried during the Battle of Winterfell on Game of Thrones. But I don’t cry—not once—when both of my parents die?
At least no one in this town will care about me or how I’m coping with their deaths. The only person back home who’d understand is Mirai.