Boggled that I knew so little about him, I decided it was time for a fishing expedition. I picked up his phone. “Cute kids.”
A grin slowly unfurled across his lips, drawing my attention to his mouth. “What are you trying to ask me, Martin?”
“Nothing.” I shrugged. “Just making an observation.”
“So you think I’m cute.”
“You?” I glanced down at his phone, but it had gone dark. I tapped the screen, and a prompt to enter the security code appeared. I held it out to him in silent question, and he tapped in the number. Again, I wasn’t trying to see it, but seriously, way to make it easy to be hacked. I refrained from saying anything. His phone, his business.
Instead, I glanced at the photo. I studied the picture of him as a boy. Then I looked at the girl. She was a feminine version of him. I could see the same mischievous twinkle in her eye, the unruly dark hair, and the same irrepressible grin.
“Yup, that’s me and my twin sister.” His voice was gruff, and he tipped his head back and squinted through the leaves at the bits and pieces of blue sky overhead as if he were trying to fit them back together to make the sky whole. “She died of leukemia.” He cleared his throat. “When we were twelve.”
chapter twenty-four
I FELT THE blood drain from my face. Shame made my heart pound, and I felt as if I might be sick. Given his frat-boy everything’s-a-party personality, I had always assumed he’d been a communications major who’d fallen ass backward into working for the ACC. I knew he’d begun his career in community outreach, organizing events and such, until his crazy hot-wing challenge had gone viral, and then suddenly he’d had an office down the hall from mine. I had no idea he’d suffered such a horrific personal loss.
He’d had a twin? He’d lost her to cancer? And all this time I had thought he was one of those lucky people who’d never had so much as a drop of rain fall in his perfect life. I was such a jerk.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was, for more than he knew. Without hesitation, I pushed off the ground and put my arms around him in a hug. He stiffened at first, obviously caught off guard, or maybe he wasn’t a hugger. Either way, I didn’t let go until I felt him relax and move to hug me in return.
“Is this awkward yet?” I teased.
He chuckled. “I think we moved through awkward to friendly, but it could turn into something else really fast.”
I pulled back just enough to see his face. His smile was a bit lopsided, his lips curving up higher on one side, as if he knew that the flip side to happy was sad, and this knowledge made it impossible for him to smile fully, knowing that there was a grim truth to every joke. How had I never noticed that before? I handed him back his phone.
“Tell me about her,” I said. It wasn’t that I wanted to poke at his sorrow. It was just that I sensed he wanted to talk about his sister.
“She was my first best friend,” he said. He shifted and leaned back against the trunk of a tree. “We were always together. In fact, we were so inseparable that our names merged into one. The entire family called us JasonJess, sort of a Jason-and-Jess mashup. She was always Jess, not Jessica or Jessie, just Jess.”
He glanced at me, and his voice was thick with memories. “She was born five minutes before me, and she never let me forget it. We grew up in Charlton, a small town in Massachusetts, and we ran wild. Jess could climb our favorite tree higher than me, catch fish bigger than mine, and there was no hill she was afraid to sled down. She lived life large and in charge.”
I felt my throat get tight. Jason’s love for his sister was evident in every word he said, and the sadness that shadowed his eyes made his grief palpable. It was as much a part of who he was as his quick wit or the strong line of his jaw.
“When we were ten, she broke her arm when she fell out of our tree because we were having a Nerf gun battle with the Davidson boys across the street. They were total buttheads. Looking back, I think Pete Davidson may have been crushing on Jess. She’d gotten his attention by punching him in the mouth when he took her skateboard without asking.”
He grinned at the memory and I did, too.
“It was love at first knuckle sandwich?” I asked. “I take it she was not crushing on him in return.”
“Yeah, no, Jess was full-on tomboy with no interest in kissing and all that gross junk. Poor Pete, he didn’t stand a chance.”
Jason lifted up his phone and studied the picture. I glanced at it, too. Now that I knew, the boy was clearly a younger version of Jason. I studied Jess. She looked to be a scamp. I could only imagine the chicanery these two had gotten into as kids.
“My mom has that picture framed and on the wall of the living room. It was taken a few weeks before Jess’s fall,” he said. The image went dark, and he tucked his phone into his pocket. “We didn’t know anything was wrong with her. She was always so rough-and-tumble, she never slowed down, but then her arm wouldn’t mend.”
His voice caught, and he took a steadying breath. I knew he was reliving the exact moment when the bottom had fallen out of his life. I wanted to reach out to him, but I waited, not wanting to interrupt.
“When the doctors ran tests, they discovered she had leukemia,” he said. “I didn’t understand. I thought it was like a cold or the flu, and she’d just shake it off. I mean, she was Jess—nothing stopped her. But she kept getting weaker and weaker. I thought she was milking it to get out of school. I’d had to go without her, which sucked, and I didn’t realize what was happening, how serious it all was, until I found my mother in the kitchen one afternoon. She was sitting on the floor, curled up against the cupboard, crying into a dish towel. It was then that I knew it was bad, really bad.”
He swallowed hard. He blinked. And then he continued, “She was in treatment for two years, but her cancer was aggressive, and her body was so riddled with tumors that they couldn’t save her.” His voice was raw, and he ran a hand over his face. When I looked into his eyes, just a glance before he turned away, he looked broken.
“She was the person I loved most in the world,” he said. His eyes were watery and his voice tight. “I wanted to die with her because in my mind, we were supposed to do everything together. We were a team, two halves of a whole, and I didn’t understand how she could leave me.”
I nodded. I knew how that pain felt. A tear coursed down my cheek, and I wiped it away. This time I did reach out to him. I took his free hand in mine and gave his fingers a gentle squeeze. When I would have let go, he turned his palm and laced his fingers with mine as if he wasn’t ready to give up the comfort of contact just yet.
“I didn’t know how to go on without her,” he said. “In fact, I refused to celebrate my birthday—it was our birthday—for years. When the big life moments came up, I didn’t want to participate in any of it. Graduations, proms, getting my driver’s license—every event felt like something, or rather someone, Jess, was missing. I couldn’t get past it.”
I knew exactly what he meant. Grief. The bottomlessness of it had been what surprised me the most. Every time I thought the feeling of loss couldn’t get worse, a birthday would roll around, or a holiday or a special event, and the realization that my mother wasn’t there to be a part of it would send me spinning into bereavement like a drunk on a bender.
I was twenty-two when I lost Mom. It had always felt so young to suffer such a great loss, but Jason had been twelve when he lost his sister. If I had struggled, and I had, I could only imagine how hard it must have been for him to go through the process of grieving his twin at such a tender age.
“After a few bad episodes, I ended up in therapy,” he said. He gave me a rueful look. “Not surprisingly, I couldn’t manage everything I was feeling, grief and guilt and rage, and I tried to relieve my own pain by hurting myself. Small things, a cut here and a burn there. When my mom saw a scar on my arm, she flipped out. She was not about to lose another kid. Not on her watc
h.” He paused, and his mouth curved up just a little on one side. “I went right into counseling, and my therapist helped me to understand what survivor’s guilt is. It took me a long time to accept that it wasn’t my fault that I lived and Jess died, a very long time, and sometimes I still wonder—”
“If she should have lived instead?” My voice was barely a whisper.
“Yeah.” He choked out the word and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew what I wanted to say. My heart was exploding with it. That the world needed him, that I needed him, but I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I took a deep breath and asked, “And what would Jess say if she knew you thought that?”
A surprised laugh burst out of him, and he said, “She wouldn’t say anything. She’d kick my ass.”
He turned to me with a small smile, which I returned.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. My voice was tight. I cleared my throat, wanting to be strong for him. “That must have been just brutal.”
“Yeah, it was,” he said. “But I learned to keep moving forward even when I didn’t want to.”
I nodded. We were quiet for a while, enjoying the dappled sunlight, the gentle breeze, the companionable silence.
“Okay, Martin, your turn,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Now you know why I work at the ACC, but why do you? What’s your origin story?”
I snorted. Leave it to Jason to make a backstory sound more like a superhero’s journey, but then again, maybe it was. I plucked a blade of grass and considered it.
“I told you my father was remarrying,” I said. “But I don’t know if I mentioned that he’s a widower.”
“Oh, shit, Chelsea, I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yeah, that crushing loss I mentioned to you in Paris? It was my mom. Seven years ago,” I said. “Pancreatic cancer. I was here, actually, working at the vineyard, when I got the call.”
Our gazes met, and the look of understanding on his face, as if he knew exactly how devastating that call had been, almost undid me. I hadn’t cried over the loss of my mother in a while, but his gentle sympathy almost brought it bubbling up to the surface. I shook my head and tossed the sliver of grass into the air and watched it pinwheel back to the earth.
“You know what was weird? When I got home, she seemed fine,” I said. “She and Dad picked me up at Logan. My sister was away at college, but she came home shortly after I arrived, and we had a family meeting about our new reality. The thing I remember most was thinking that it had to be a mistake, because she looked totally normal.”
Jason didn’t say anything. He just listened. Given that most people tried to change the subject when the loss of my mother came up, Jason’s acceptance was a welcome change.
“The disease moved swiftly, however,” I said. “She was already stage four. The cancer had spread to other major organs when it was discovered, so it wasn’t resectable, but she held on a lot longer than we thought she would. She was stubborn like that.”
“How long?” he asked.
“We had a little over three months from the time I arrived home until she passed away,” I said. “We tried to make the most of it.”
He nodded, and I knew he understood how differently you start to view time when the grains of sand start dropping in the hourglass faster and faster and there’s nothing you can do to slow it down.
“My mom was my best friend. I suppose that’s odd, but we had a special connection. My younger sister, Annabelle, was a daddy’s girl. If he was fixing a toilet, well, then she was right in there with him, handing him a wrench. But for me, it was all mom all the time. I was her shadow. Saturdays were our baking days. We both loved to bake elaborate cakes for all occasions. I remember one Christmas we made a cake that when you sliced it, a Christmas tree appeared in the middle.
“Then there was the time we made a peanut butter cake. After hours of being so good, our golden retriever, Sally, jumped up on the counter and bit into the cake.” I laughed at the memory. “Sally bolted for the door with half of the cake in her mouth, and my mom ran after her. I have no idea what she thought she was going to do.
“Sally managed to eat that enormous chunk of cake while running, and there was my mom chasing after her with her apron flapping in the breeze for the entire neighborhood to see. It took her years to live that down. I always wondered why she chased the dog. Surely she didn’t think the cake was salvageable. When Sally spent the night vomiting the cake back up, my mom told her it served her right, but then she slept on the floor and stayed by Sally’s side all night, rubbing her belly so she’d feel better.”
I smiled and Jason returned it, which was what I’d hoped for. It hurt me to see him hurting. I was humbled that he’d told me about Jess, and it felt good to tell him about my mom. So few people really understood, but I knew now that he did. There was an emotional connection between us that I’d never felt with anyone outside my family before. Maybe it was the bond of having survived great loss, or perhaps it was being in charge of such a major gift, or maybe it was a combination of the two. Either way, I was seeing Knightley differently, and I knew I could never dismiss him as just a handsome charmer ever again.
“You know what was the hardest part, outside of losing Jess, of course?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was all hard, miserably, awfully, brutally, wrenchingly hard. I’d never really broken it down into a hierarchy of pain.
“Watching her get smaller and smaller,” he said. His voice was soft. “I used to go into her room when she was sleeping, and I’d put my fingers around her wrist to see if it had gotten any smaller. Some days I could convince myself that she hadn’t lost any weight, but other days I couldn’t lie to myself, and I knew she was shrinking, disappearing before my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to stop the cancer from siphoning off the rambunctious, loud Jess I knew and leaving this fragile little bird in her place.”
Yeah, I remembered. My mom had always had feminine curves, as a love of cake will do to a gal, but when she got sick, the pounds had swiftly slipped off her, leaving her skin sagging around her bones and her eyes sunken in her bald head. It had been a struggle for my mom, who, while not vain, had always felt confident in her femininity. The disease had stripped her of that. My throat got tight at the memory of those last days with her, because even while knowing that she would be out of pain when she passed, I selfishly hadn’t wanted to say goodbye.
“Sorry,” I choked. I waved my hand as if I could wave away the emotions that were suffocating me. I rested my head on my folded arms, trying to breathe through it.
“Nah, it’s okay,” he said. “I get it.” He put his hand on my back and ran it up and down my spine in a comforting gesture.
“My memories of Jess are so bittersweet,” he said. “Bitter because there are no more, but sweet because they keep her alive in my heart and mind and I treasure that, even though it hurts.”
That was it, exactly. I had never, not in all my years of working for the ACC, met someone who put into words what I felt so precisely. Never could I ever have imagined that the person most likely to understand me so completely would be Jason Knightley.
I lifted my head and turned toward him. He didn’t move, so I leaned forward and put my arms around him. We had just shared so much grief and pain that I desperately needed to feel anchored to something or someone. I needed help to step back from the ledge of grief that made me want to jump and wallow in the darkness.
A shudder rippled through me as I tried to get it together. He pulled me in close and tight. We huddled like survivors after a storm, trying to assess the damage while getting our bearings. I could feel his heart beat in time with mine, our breath mingling. The amber-resin scent of him wrapped around me like an invisible cord, lashing me to him. I wanted to stay there forever, but I couldn’t.
I pulled back, forcing myself to let go of him. He was a coworker. We had a major ask to nail down in the next few days. These were lines that couldn’t be crossed.
“Sorry,” I said. I fisted my hands and drew them toward my middle to keep myself from reaching for him again.
“Hey, it’s okay. We shared some pretty heavy-duty stuff. It’s perfectly normal to get caught up in the moment.”
I turned away and drew up my knees, tucking myself into a little ball of self-containment. I had this. I could resist the urge to cling to him, to bury my face in the curve of his neck, to weep all over his chest, to place my mouth on his. Really, I could.
“So hugging the stuffing out of you is the normal reaction from women when you tell them about your sister?” I teased, trying to break the tension between us.
He leaned back. His eyes met mine, and I noticed they were as blue and clear as the sky above. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never told anyone about Jess before, not even Aidan.”
Whoa. I had no idea what to say to that, so I said nothing.
He stood and held out his hand. “Come on—Severin might be here soon,” he said.
* * *
• • • •
WE WALKED BACK to the castle, continuing our tour, maneuvering around a busload of visitors, who were gathered for a lecture by a staff member. We paused to listen for a bit before moving on.
“Can I ask you something?” Jason asked, following me into the cask room, which was in actuality a very barrel-crowded former dungeon.
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you love him?” he asked.
I hissed out a breath. I knew I could lie and say yes and end this whole thing between us, but after he’d taken me into his confidence and told me about his sister, I simply could not do him wrong like that, not even for the greater good.
“I did once,” I said. “And I think maybe I could again.”
“You think? Maybe?”
Paris Is Always a Good Idea Page 30