“Alex, I know this is a lot for you to absorb. I just want to be here for you. Let me help you get through this.”
“Peter, I don’t think I—” Her voice caught and broke. “You’d better go. Please.”
“All right.” He held up the envelope she’d almost forgotten and set it on the dresser. “I’ll leave the letter here. I’m staying at the Merritt Motor Inn.” Still he didn’t walk away; Alex felt a weakness flooding her body, a weight grinding her down.
“Let me help you, Alex,” Peter murmured. “At least let me do that.” And he took her into his arms.
She let him hold her. She didn’t have the will to summon a protest. Her head felt too heavy to hold up, and when Peter cradled it against his shoulder she didn’t resist.
A second later the bedroom door swung open. Kieran walked into the room, looked at them, and froze.
“Kieran,” she croaked.
He said nothing, only stared at her, his face expressionless. Peter held her a little tighter, and suddenly she felt trapped. Trapped and desperate and thoroughly unable to cope.
With a jerk she pulled free of Peter’s embrace and backed away until her legs hit the bed. Kieran started after her just as Peter did. She stopped them both with upflung hands.
“I need to be alone,” she said. “Please. Both of you, just leave me alone.”
Peter smoothed his hair carefully back above his forehead. “All right, Alex,” he said. He threw a long look at Kieran. “You know where I’ll be. Please… think about what I said. I meant every word.” He hesitated only a moment longer and strode to the door. Kieran made no move to follow. In the silence Alex could hear the front door close and the rumble of the truck’s engine as it pulled away.
“Alexandra.”
She looked through him, as she’d looked through Peter earlier, “Go. Please go.” She squeezed her eyes shut, willing him to obey.
His breathing was soft, but in the silence it filled the room. “I can’t, Alexandra. You need me.”
The same way Peter insisted she needed him. Seeming devotion she could no more deal with than the anger and guilt and grief she had never expected to feel.
“You’re hurting,” Kieran told her, moving closer. She wondered if she could yell at him, if she could bring herself to say something hurtful enough to drive him away. But she knew that was impossible the moment she met his gaze.
“Your father is dead,” he said. So baldly, with no finesse at all. “I’m sorry, Alexandra.”
She turned to the window. “You heard everything, didn’t you?” she said wearily. She flipped the curtain back, though there was little for human eyes to see in the darkness.
“You’ve never spoken about your parents,” he said. He moved along the perimeter of the room, granting her at least a little distance. “I don’t remember mine. Not the way I should. But I still think I know what you must feel.”
She shuddered, fingers clenched on the curtain. Of course he did. He’d lost as much, or more, than she ever had.
“My father and I—we were never close,” she said. She heard the curtain’s old muslin protest and begin to tear in her grasp. She let go. “I hadn’t seen him in many years.”
“But you still grieve,” Kieran said.
Do I? She rested her forehead against the cold glass. “My mother died when I was a child,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless. “There was an accident. My father and I survived. But my mother’s death didn’t bring us closer. It had the opposite effect.”
She expected him to ask more about the accident, to mention the scar at last. But he only leaned against the wall and watched her with those deep, steady eyes, urging her to talk with his very silence. So unlike Peter, with his endless questioning.
Alex moved away from the window. It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought to simply… not feel anything, to talk about these things to one who’d had no part in them.
“My father didn’t enjoy being a parent,” she said. “He sent me away to boarding school most of the time, and wasn’t around when I came home for the summers. It was as if…”