Chapter 13: My Brother's Smile

Kirk's POV

I gave her six minutes, and I knew it was wrong to wait even that long.

The east gate scraped under my hand, and I went across the wet lawn at a run.

I saw Camilla first.

She was sitting in the flower bed with her back against the cottage wall and her shoes in her lap.

Her face was the color of paper.

Then I looked up at the doorway.

A tall man stood there with a linen napkin in his hand.

He had gone soft in the middle and pale in the face, and he wore a gray cardigan I would have laughed at five years ago.

The hooked scar on his chin was the one he got when I was nine and he was ten, falling off a garage roof I had dared him to climb.

I stopped walking.

"Kirk," Chadwick said. "You came."

He said it the way he used to say it when I turned up at his door with a toolbox and a bad reason.

I had stood at his grave in the rain.

I had held the cord of the casket when they lowered it, and I had cried in front of strangers.

"You're dead," I said.

It was the stupidest thing I have ever said out loud.

"Mostly," Chadwick said, and smiled.

It was the smile that had talked my mother out of her ring and my father out of a car.

I had missed it every day for five years.

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