Dear Brother, You Loved Me Too Late novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Music Box
On her 19th birthday Angie is blamed for the shattered music box. Her stepbrother says he wishes she had died instead of their mother, and she walks out to read a letter that gives her three months.
The music box hit the marble floor of the foyer and broke into five pieces.
Angie Boswell stood on the third stair with her hands still out, holding nothing.
Delaney Frost looked down at the silver pieces, then up at Angie, and she smiled.
It lasted one second.
Then her face crumpled and she screamed, "Angie, why would you throw it at me?"
Footsteps came fast from the dining room.
Her father got there first, then her brother, then the housekeeper, who stopped in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands.
Delaney was already crying into Colin's chest.
"I only asked to see it," she said. "She snatched it and threw it. It could have hit my face."
Angie came down the stairs one step at a time.
"She took it out of my hands," she said. "I was carrying it to the table."
Her father crouched and picked up the lid with the tiny silver bird on it.
He turned it over slowly.
"This was your mother's," Gerald Boswell said. "It was the only thing of hers that survived you."
"Dad, I didn't break it."
"Delaney has never lied in this house."
"Neither have I."
"Haven't you?" He didn't look up. "You told me you were studying all week. Delaney saw you leaving the library at midnight."
"I was working a double at the diner."
"Of course you were."
Today was her nineteenth birthday.
There had been no cake and no card.
Her father had set her place at the end of the table, the way he did every year.
He had said nothing about the date.
She had wound the music box once a year since she was eight, always on this night.
It was the only birthday song she had ever had.
She had asked to bring it down for one minute at dinner, just to hear it with someone in the room.
Her father had said fine, and meant it as a punishment.
Now the little gears lay in the corner by the umbrella stand.
The housekeeper knelt without a word and began picking up the pieces with her bare hands.
Colin had not spoken yet.
He stood with one arm around Delaney, his jaw tight, looking at his sister.
He was twenty-four and had run the Boswell Freight offices since last spring.
He was Gerald's son by his first wife.
Angie's mother had married Gerald five months pregnant by a man who left.
So Angie had the Boswell name and the Boswell house, and not one drop of Boswell blood.
When Angie was six, he had carried her home on his back through the snow.
She did not let herself think about that now.
She did not let herself think about how tall he had grown.
Or about her pulse, which still jumped when he looked at her.
"Colin," she said. "You know me. You know I wouldn't."
"Do I?"
His voice was very quiet.
"You took Mom," he said. "Now you've taken the last thing we had of her."
"I was born. That's not the same as taking."
"Isn't it?"
Delaney sniffled against his shirt.
Angie saw her fingers curl into the cotton, tight and pleased.
Colin's eyes did not move off his sister.
"I used to wish it every night when I was little," he said. "Now I'm saying it out loud, so you can stop pretending you don't know."
"Colin."
"I wish it had been you in that hospital instead of Mom."
The foyer went still.
Even the clock in the hall seemed to stop for it.
Angie waited for her father to say something.
He turned the silver bird over in his palm and kept looking at it.
She waited for the housekeeper, who had stopped moving.
The housekeeper looked at Gerald with open fury and said nothing, because she needed her job.
She waited for Colin to take it back.
He didn't.
"Okay," Angie said.
Her voice came out steady, and she was surprised by it.
She walked past all of them to the coat hooks by the front door.
Her coat was the oversized grey wool one, with the lining torn at the pocket where she kept a single red mitten.
She put it on.
"Where do you think you're going?" her father said. "Sit down. Apologize to Delaney."
"No."
"Angelica."
"It's my birthday, Dad," she said. "I'm going to go and spend it somewhere else."
Nobody stopped her.
The door closed behind her with a soft click, very polite.
The cold hit her face on the front walk.
She kept going until she reached the streetlight at the end of the drive.
Her hands were shaking now.
In the inside pocket of the coat was the envelope she had picked up from the clinic that afternoon.
She had been carrying it through the whole dinner and had not opened it.
She tore it along the edge with her thumb and read it under the light.
The words were typed and polite.
Diffuse gastric adenocarcinoma. Stage IV. Metastatic to the liver and peritoneum.
Estimated survival without treatment: two to three months.
Angie read it twice.
Then she folded it and put it back into the pocket beside the mitten, and began to walk.
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