Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, her own grief and pain dampening the collar of my shirt where she huddles into me. “I love you so much.”
I absorb her words into my lungs like a deep breath and slide down the wall to the same spot on the floor where I found her. She settles across my lap and pushes my hair back. Peering into my face, her water-sky eyes are brilliant and stormy and raining tears.
I pull her to my chest again, compulsively needing to feel her heart thumping into mine. Even though Dad told me she was okay. Even though I’ve already seen Millie, safe and devastated and desolate, in the waiting room, I had to see Lennix with my own eyes. And now I can’t let her go. She’s slim and small and willowy against the width of my chest, but she’s my tree in this storm.
She pulls back.
“Don’t,” I mutter with a swift shake of my aching head, tightening my arms around her. “Don’t let go.”
She nods, the cool, tumbled strands of her hair brushing against my neck.
“When Dad said there had been an accident at the fundraiser, you were the first person I thought about. I could have lost you both tonight.”
“You didn’t.”
“But Owen…” My voice breaks. Something inside me breaks, and my emotions are ungoverned, an anarchy of relief for Lennix, grief for Owen, rage at whomever set this tragedy in motion. If I’d lost them both, I’d be living in darkness. Lennix feels like my one tiny point of light, and still I can’t see.
“Maxim.”
My father stands over us, startling me. His bleak gaze moves between Lennix and me with a kind of dull acceptance.
“Dad,” I say, my voice as strong as can be expected through a throat grated by the lifetime of sorrow I’ve crammed into the past two hours.
“The medical examiner is ready to talk to the family.” He looks at Lennix and then away, his mouth a grim line.
“Go,” she says softly, lifting wet, spiky lashes to catch my eyes. “I need to call Kimba back. Could you let me know what we should…um, say to the press? The scene has been locked down, but there are already rumors circulating. I don’t want us to say anything your family doesn’t want us to.”
The reality of moving forward with the logistics crushes me. The press will make theater of my family’s real pain. Owen will be “the senator,” “the candidate” on the morning news and in all the papers, but to my mother, in so much pain she’s had to be sedated, he’s “the son.” To Millicent, dull-eyed, devastated, he was “the husband”—the love of her life. And to the twins, he was “Dad.”
To me, he’s the big brother I never said “I love you” to enough. I didn’t voice how much I admired him, not for the laws he passed or any of the things the reporters will commemorate. I admired him for the way he loved his wife and kids. For managing to be a good man who genuinely cared about others when he could have been, by all rights, an entitled asshole who cared only about himself.
I finally nod and dip my head to kiss Lennix’s temple. “I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you.” She scoots off my lap, and in the fitted evening dress, it will be hard to get up with dignity. I know she’s cognizant of my father’s presence here, so I stand and pull her up. She shoots me a grateful look and then shifts her glance to my father.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Cade,” she says softly, a little stiffly. “Owen was one of the finest men I’ve ever met.” Her eyes soften, and her shoulders lose some of their tension. “I mean that truly.”
“Thank you,” he replies, his tone abrupt but not rude or cruel. He tips his head toward the waiting room. “The medical examiner is waiting, son.”
She holds the phone to her chest, and I know her quick mind already has to shift to her team and the press and the shit I don’t care about at all right now but know must be done. Leaving her to that, I follow my father into the gruesome new reality that none of us can ignore.
CHAPTER 28
LENNIX
I’ve always avoided funerals. I imagined I’d sit in the audience the whole time thinking the family at least “lucky” to have a formal goodbye. To know what the end held and have closure, unlike my family.
This is not luck.
Millie sitting between her twins in the front row before a casket that can’t even be opened because her husband is so disfigured and badly burned inside—that’s not luck.
Salina sits beside Darcy, brushing her hair with one hand and pressing the little girl’s head to her shoulder. “Auntie Sal,” they call her. I’m sure, had the campaign gotten further along, we would have had more contact. She seems deeply embedded in the family’s lives. Apparently, she was legal counsel for one of Warren’s companies before opening her own law firm specializing in immigration law. Seated between Darcy and Maxim, she fits right in, and I can’t help but think she’s exactly the kind of woman Warren would choose for his son.