Beneath the Patchwork Moon (Hope Springs, #2) (20 page)

He could have saved his sister’s life.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

L
una spent most of the morning second-guessing everything she did around the house. Mostly because she didn’t remember what she’d been doing and had to retrace her steps. Her mind was not on any of her tasks—not on emptying the living room’s shelves and drawers, which she’d finally finished, not on climbing into the attic a half dozen times to bring down stored boxes, which she’d also done. Not on tossing out the complete waste of fabric stored in Carlita Caffey’s sewing room, fabrics that had been shredded into nests for squirrels and rats.

Her mind was on Angelo’s pain.

Of course he and his family had suffered. They’d lost their family’s heart. But not realizing that Sierra had called him, what she’d asked from him—and worse, what he’d said to her—Luna had no idea the weight of the burden he’d carried. A weight thick with guilt and regrets even more debilitating than those that had bound her to the past for so long. She couldn’t imagine having lived with those words echoing in his head all this time. Even now, her chest was so tight she had to stop at the bottom of the stairs to catch her breath.

She didn’t know where Angelo was. She hadn’t seen him since he’d walked out of the kitchen earlier. She’d wanted
to follow, but she was still reeling from what he’d told her. Those words… She couldn’t even imagine them coming out of his mouth, and he’d said them to his sister? His then seventeen-year-old pregnant sister? His sister who’d needed him to help her through the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life?

It was so not like the Angelo Luna had known during her high school years. Granted, they’d had very little time together before Sierra’s death, a year and a half at the most. But not once during those months, or the two years following the funeral, had he been anything but kind when he spoke of Sierra. Even now, Luna didn’t doubt his affection for his sister had been anything but real. She only wished she understood what would’ve caused him to lash out.

She moved to the door of Sierra’s room. Neither she nor Angelo had yet crossed the threshold, as if this room were where all of his sister’s secrets were kept. As if entering would break some sort of imaginary seal that had kept her memory alive. As if doing so were a sin, a sacrilege. And yet here he was, sitting at her vanity table, her mirror giving Luna two Angelos to look at as she stood in the door.

She studied the one who lived and breathed. “I wondered where you’d gone.”

He looked up at her, his eyes bleary, appearing drunk when she knew that wasn’t the case at all. “Everything is still here. Nothing’s been touched since that weekend.” He reached behind him, picked up a bowl and a spoon from the vanity. “This is her cereal bowl. This would’ve been the last meal she ate in this house. You came by that morning to pick her up for school. After school, the two of you were supposedly
headed to art camp in San Marcos. The next time she was in this house, she was dead.”

Luna closed her eyes against the rising rush of tears, opened them again, and walked in to be assailed by memories. How many nights had she slept in this room, either bunking on the floor or crammed with Sierra into her twin bed? They hadn’t cared how crowded they were, how little sleep they got. They’d talked and laughed, tried out makeup, painted each other’s nails. Sierra had put braids in Luna’s hair and looped them all over her head. Luna had done the same for Sierra, and they’d danced like the best of Bollywood.

She walked to the vanity, picked up the plain black frame holding a five-by-seven photo of Oscar. It was the official St. Thomas Preparatory School portrait taken at the end of their junior year. Luna’s own portrait sat on the mantel in her parents’ den. She’d packed away Sierra’s when cleaning the living room shelves just yesterday.

“They… got married,” she heard herself saying before she could stop the flow of the words, and she mentally begged Sierra’s forgiveness. In her peripheral vision, she saw Angelo lift his head. “Friday morning before the baby was delivered that afternoon.”

“What do you mean, married?” he asked, breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring.

“I mean married. Man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Gatlin.”

“You were there?” he asked, and she nodded.

“They were very, very much in love, Angel.” She returned the frame to the table and looked at him. “You know they were.”

“What I know is that she should never have gone to St. Thomas.” He stopped, flung the spoon and bowl across the
room. The bowl shattered, the shards scattering, the spoon clattered, and Luna flinched. “That school ruined her life.”

She backed up to sit on the foot of the bed. “How can you say that?”

“Easy. It’s the truth.”

“She had an amazing talent. You can’t deny that.”

“I’m not denying her talent, but she could’ve continued to study with Mr. Miyazawa. She didn’t need any of what St. Thomas offered. She sure as hell didn’t need Oscar Gatlin.”

“Without St. Thomas, she never would’ve met Oscar. And I would never have met her.”
I wouldn’t have met you either
. “I don’t even want to think what high school would’ve been like without her.”

“You’d have survived. You’ve survived since.”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure,” she said, wanting to take back the words. What she’d gone through didn’t matter when compared to this man’s loss.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Luna? What do you mean?”

She tore off the rest of the bandage. “Look at me, Angel. I’m twenty-eight years old and only just now moving out of my parents’ home. When I was confined to bed after the accident, my mother brought me a loom. I’ve done nothing else with my life. Nothing. It’s like if I take a step out of that world, I’ll lose Sierra forever.”

“Sierra’s been gone for ten years, Luna. You lost her…
we
lost her a long time ago.”

He was right, but even knowing that, she couldn’t bring herself to make the break. “My head knows that. My heart can’t let her go.”

“You don’t have to let her go. I think about her daily, yet I’ve moved on with my life.”

“Have you?” she asked, before she could stop the words from spilling.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, his frown deep.

“You’re hiding away in Vermont. Out of touch with your family—”

“Hey, that’s on them, not me.”

“Have you tried to contact them? Have you made any effort at all to make amends?”

“Because I’m the one who needs to?” His eyes were wide and wild. “You were there that day. You know what happened.”

“No, Angelo,” she said. “You would’ve had to talk to me for me to know.”

His jaw tightened. His gaze grew hard before he dropped it to the floor, staring down, flexing his hands, his elbows on his knees. “Teenagers.” He bit off a rush of sharp words beneath his breath. “Married.”

He wanted to change the subject? Fine. “Their bond was stronger than I’ve seen in some longtime married couples. They knew what they were facing.”

“How could they know what they were facing?” He barked the question at her. “Who knows anything at eighteen? Sierra was all about her cello. And Oscar… you know the Gatlins wrapped him in swaddling. He probably never had to deal with so much as a hangnail.”

She bristled. He hadn’t known Oscar at all. “You weren’t here to see them. I’m not even sure your parents realized what those two had as a couple—”

“They were eighteen. What did they even know about being a couple?”

Her heart clutched as she thought back to the things she’d felt for Angelo at that age. “You think eighteen-year-olds can’t fall in love?”

“Not those two. They didn’t even live in the real world. All they knew was music.”

The way all she knew was weaving. “They lived music. It’s all they needed to know.”

“I build furniture for a living, Luna. You think I don’t know a little bit about what it’s like to be an artist? Or a craftsman, at least? I’ve never worked a nine-to-five, or left my work at the office, or known what to expect any particular day. I understand immersion. But I also got my degree. Sierra left public school at fifteen, and for three or four years before that, she spent her afternoons and weekends with Mr. Miyazawa. She never even bothered with her driver’s license. How was she in any way equipped to be a wife, much less a mother? And to balance that with any sort of music career? Uh-uh. I can’t see it.”

“She couldn’t see it either. Nor could Oscar. That’s why they made the decision they did. As much as they both wanted to be a family with their child, the timing was all wrong.”

“So you say.”

Oh, he was frustrating. “They were my best friends. I knew them as well as I knew your family.”

“You only know what you saw.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did you ever hear my parents fight? Did you ever see my father swing his guitar,
his guitar
, at Felix and Emilio when they were arguing over who had to take out the trash? Were you ever there for dinner when my mother set a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter on the table? No jelly. No milk. No
plates or napkins or knives. And that when there was hamburger in the fridge, even tuna and noodles in the pantry. But she wasn’t in the mood to cook.”

She swallowed against the burning sensation rising up her throat. “I never saw any of that.”

“Well, it happened. You get a whole house full of creatives or artists or whatever together, everyone living in their own heads, there’s a whole lot of crazy in the air. And most of the time, you don’t even know anyone’s breathing it in until the yelling starts.”

Yelling. Crazy and loud and unexpected. “Is that why moving day got so ugly?”

“You want to talk about moving day?” he asked, surging to his feet to hover over her. “Fine. We’ll talk about moving day.”

For eight years now, the number-one rule of moving day had been the same as that of
Fight Club
. So why in the world he was breaking it to talk about what had happened… He took a deep breath. Blew it out. Took another. She did this to him, this woman. Made him nuts. Made him angry. Made him weak. He couldn’t tell her no, but telling her yes was just as bad. Nothing in his life had been the same since the first day he’d seen her, when she’d whipped around the hood of his car after he’d honked at Sierra.

“I don’t even know what you want me to say.” A good place to start, he guessed. “Or what you want to hear.”

“I want to hear what was going on in your head. Why you wanted me there.” She pulled her knees to her chest,
wrapped her arms around them. “Why you picked that day to tell them we were together. Without talking to me. When you knew they hated me for lying about driving Sierra to art camp. When you knew they blamed me for her being in Oscar’s car, never mind that she was eighteen and capable of thinking for herself.”

Seeing Luna there, sitting on his sister’s bed like so many times in the past… He shook off the memories that were strangling him and looked down at his scarred hands. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I knew they weren’t happy about me calling my mother’s family for help. I guess they expected things to continue as they had been, but after Sierra died, every time I talked to them things were worse than the last. I had to do something, and it was the only thing I could think to do.”

“But what does that have to do with me?” she asked, her impatience causing him no small amount of grief, though his avoidance was causing him the greatest.

“Sierra was gone. I hadn’t lived at home in three years. I was the outsider, and I wanted someone in my corner.” He stopped, shook his head. “No. I wanted
you
in my corner. I wanted
your
support. Being with you was the only thing that got me through those years. I thought if you were there, you’d get me through that day.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me that when I picked you up at the airport?” she asked, leaving the bed, coming to kneel in front of him, to take his hands in hers and squeeze. “I hadn’t seen your family since the funeral. I had no idea what I was walking into.” She bowed her head, pressed it to their joined hands. “All that time we were together, and you never told me how it was for you at home. For all of you.”

He huffed beneath his breath, pulled his hands free, and got to his feet. He couldn’t do this with her touching him. “When did we ever talk about anything that mattered?”

She was slow to respond, pushing up to sit on Sierra’s vanity bench, as if moving that far was all the strength she had. “Everything we talked about mattered, Angel. I learned more about you those weekends we spent together away from Hope Springs than I did the whole time I was in high school.”

“What I was doing at school, sure. What I wanted to do with my life. Hopes and dreams and all that crap—”

“It was not crap. It was important. It was what I wanted to hear. It was what made you
you
.” She paused, and he leaned back against the doorframe, his hands stacked behind him, his gaze on Luna’s bowed head. “That’s what hurt so bad when you walked away at the airport without saying a word. And then you vanished. No calls. No letters. It wasn’t that you didn’t choose me over your family. It was that you didn’t choose anyone. You just… checked out.”