“Okay,” she said, kicking her shoes off before sitting cross-legged on the couch. Leah pulled the throw pillow onto her lap as she said, “She died in a car accident. Some guy was driving drunk and came over the divider. Hit her head on.”
Danny closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Recently?”
“About fifteen years ago.”
The room fell silent, and Leah kept her eyes on the throw pillow as she picked at a fraying thread. After a few seconds, she saw him lean forward, and she looked up to see him resting his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of his mouth.
“Does it get easier?” he asked.
The second the words left his mouth, something passed between them, and she smiled sadly. “In some ways yes, and in others, not even remotely.”
He nodded, his eyes dropping to watch her fingers play with the loose thread on the pillow.
“Who did you lose?”
He swallowed hard, and it was a moment before he said, “My best friend.”
“Bryan?” she asked, and his eyes flashed to hers as he straightened abruptly.
“How did you know that?”
She shrugged. “It was just a guess. The round of shots at the bar. Tommy said they were for Bryan, and you seemed to get upset.”
Danny took a breath, his shoulders relaxing before he nodded. “Yeah. Bryan.”
The room fell silent again, and Danny scooted forward, finding a frayed string on the other side of the pillow and mimicking Leah’s actions.
“How long ago?” she asked, pretty sure she already knew the answer.
“Yesterday was a year.”
Leah nodded. They both knew he didn’t need to say anything else, and it was a moment before he spoke the words that were like a slap to her face. “He was Catherine’s grandson.”
Her head snapped up, and unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears. She had no idea why that affected her the way it did, but the idea of that woman burying her grandson absolutely crushed her. An image of Catherine flashed in her mind: the oversized jacket, the big bulky gloves, the man’s ring hanging from a chain on her neck.
Was it possible those things were Bryan’s?
She closed her eyes, forcing a tear to spill over, and before she could react, she felt the pad of his thumb brush under her eye, sweeping it away.
Leah opened her eyes and looked at him; he had the most tender expression on his face, and she suddenly realized how backward it was, that he was comforting her over the death of his friend. She reached up and took his hand, sandwiching it between both of hers as she brought them to rest on the pillow in her lap.
“What happened to him?” she asked, running her thumbs over the back of his hand.
Danny wet his lips and looked down. “Head injury.”
That was incredibly vague, but Leah knew enough not to push the issue. Instead, she kept running her thumbs over the rough, damaged skin of his knuckles.
“That’s why I got so freaked over the flowers,” he said, and her thumbs stopped abruptly as she looked up.
“Why did that make you so mad?”
He shook his head with a sigh. “I wasn’t mad. It’s just…she keeps those things all over the house because when we were little, Bryan used to pick them from other people’s gardens and bring them home to her.” He laughed lightly. “She kept telling him that it was stealing and that it wasn’t a nice thing to do, but he could never understand how bringing his grandmother flowers was a bad thing. And she always put them in water. Always. Even after lecturing him about stealing, she’d put them up in a vase. Every fucking time.”
He looked down, a smile on his face as he shook his head at the memory. “When you sent them, it just freaked me out. I didn’t know how you knew to get those for her. I didn’t even think about the possibility that you’d seen them in her house.” He lifted his eyes to her face. “I’m sorry about that, by the way. That was so shitty of me.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine.”
It was quiet as they sat there, his hand in both of hers.
“Losing Bryan,” she finally said, and he looked up at her. “That’s not the reason you keep pulling away from me.”
He pulled his hand from hers and Leah straightened, instantly lamenting the loss. Danny gripped the edge of the table and closed his eyes. “I don’t know how to explain this to you.”
“Just say it. Whatever it is, just say it.”
He sat completely still for a moment before he pushed off the table with a huff, walking around to the other side. He stood there, blinking up at the ceiling with his hands clasped on top of his head. “Fuck…I just…” He let his hands fall, shaking his head before he looked back at her.
It hurt to watch the struggle on his face. She could see that he wanted to tell her, but fear, or embarrassment, or both, were stopping the words in his throat, and she had no idea how to make it easier for him.
Tell him something. Something about you. Something you’re not proud of.
“You want to hear something awful?” Leah said gently, and Danny stopped pacing as he looked at her. “About two years ago, my father had a heart attack.”
She twirled the loose thread around the tip of her finger until she felt it ache with the cut-off circulation.
Tell him. Tell him something you’re ashamed of, so he knows it’s okay.
Leah exhaled. “Before that night I hadn’t spoken to him for a year.”
She stared at the throw pillow on her lap until it was a mass of jumbled colors before her eyes, and she felt the couch dip under his weight as he sat beside her.
“Why?” he asked softly, reaching over and pulling the thread until it unraveled from her finger.
She curled and uncurled her aching finger as she shook her head sadly. “You have to understand something, Danny. After my mom died, I did my best to take on her role. I mean, there I was—twelve years old—cooking dinners and doing laundry, making sure my little sister took her bath, reminding my father of doctor’s appointments.”
She turned her head to see that he was watching her intently. “Nobody asked me to do it. I wanted to. I wanted our family to be normal again, and a normal family needs a mother.”
Leah looked back down, playing with the same thread on the pillow. “Everyone relied on me, you know? My dad was so frazzled for a while after, and he couldn’t do it all on his own. So I stepped up. I was basically a really young mother. Or a really old teenager, however you want to look at it,” she said with a tiny laugh, and then she lifted her head, looking at him. “But I never felt like I was losing anything, you know? I had good friends. I played sports. I never felt like I’d given anything up. I loved my family. I wanted to take care of them.”
Danny reached over, swiping a stray hair away from her face, and instinctively she leaned into his touch.
“Everything was fine until I went away to college. I mean, you would think I would have been good at being independent, right? But I was miserable. I felt so guilty being away from them that I couldn’t enjoy any of it.
“So after the first semester, I came home and enrolled in a local college. My father didn’t ask any questions; he just welcomed me back with open arms, and everything went back to the way it was before.”
Danny was watching her carefully as she spoke, but she could see in his face that he was confused; that he didn’t understand how any of this fit in with her being estranged from her father.
Here we go.
Leah inhaled deeply. “The year after I graduated, I met Scott. He was funny and sweet and handsome and just…perfect,” she said, her voice trailing off as she shook her head. It was so hard to say those words, to view him in that light now. “He was so good to me. And it was nice to be the one being taken care of for once. I didn’t realize how badly I’d needed that.”