Chapter 4 - Everything He Should Have Told Me
The candles were still burning. The flowers hadn't wilted yet. Every pew still wore its white ribbon, and the little printed programs scattered across the seats still read two names that no longer made sense together — Claire and Wesley.
I looked down at the program in my hand and felt something shift in my chest I didn't have a word for.
"Say it again," I said. "Your actual name."
"Nathan. Nathan Robert Cole."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-seven."
"Wesley would have been twenty-nine."
"Yes."
I set the program down on the altar rail. I didn't crumple it. I didn't throw it. I just set it down, carefully, like it deserved that much.
"When did he die?"
Nathan was quiet for a moment, gathering himself. "Two years after we moved. He was nine. It was his heart." He paused. "He was born with something wrong with it. My parents knew. Part of why we left was to get closer to a specialist two towns over. It didn't matter in the end. It didn't help."
"Your parents knew he was dying when they packed that truck."
"Yes."
"And nobody told anyone on our street. No note. Nothing."
"My mother couldn't —" He stopped himself, started again. "She couldn't talk about it. She still can't, not really, not even now. She packed our whole house in four days flat because she said if she ever stopped moving, she'd fall apart and never get back up. Saying goodbye would have meant stopping."
I thought about my own mother at that kitchen table, year after year. You're waiting on a ghost, Claire. She had no idea how close to right she actually was.
"Why did you come to the bakery at all?" I asked. "After twenty years. Why show up in the first place?"
"Because I promised him." His voice steadied in the particular way things go steady when they've been held rigid for a very long time. "And because I spent twenty years thinking about the girl in that photograph. The one who stood in the driveway until the car was completely out of sight. Wesley talked about you every single day until he physically couldn't anymore. He said you were the bravest person he ever met, because you never cried in front of anyone."
"I cried plenty."
"I know. He said you always did it up in the oak tree so nobody would see."
My hand flew to my mouth before I could stop it.
"He used to watch you," Nathan said. "From his bedroom window, after we moved. He said you climbed that tree three separate times the week we left. He felt sick about it for the rest of his life. He made me promise I'd tell you that."
The candle nearest to me flickered in a draft coming from somewhere.
"You should have told me the truth the second you walked into that bakery," I said.
"Yes."
"You should have said — I'm his brother, he asked me to find you, I'm sorry for everything that happened."
"Yes."
"Instead you let me fall in love with a name that belongs to a nine-year-old boy who's been gone for twenty years."
His face didn't flinch. He didn't try to soften it, didn't try to explain it away.
"Yes," he said again. "I did that. And I'm sorry. I've been trying to find the right moment to tell you the truth for two solid years, and there isn't one. There's no version of this conversation that doesn't hurt you. I knew that from the beginning. And I kept going anyway, because I was a coward, and because I loved you, and I convinced myself those two things could somehow live in the same body at the same time."
"They can't."
"No." He looked down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. "They can't."
Silence stretched out between us. Faintly, through the walls, I could hear the murmur of a hundred and six people standing around in a parking lot, not knowing what to do with themselves.
"What happens now?" I asked.
"That's entirely up to you." He reached into his jacket pocket again, and this time pulled out a small cream envelope, sealed shut, my name written across the front in handwriting I didn't recognize.
"Wesley wrote this when he was eight. My mother kept it all these years. She gave it to me the morning I finally went to find you." He set it on the altar rail next to the crumpled program. "I was supposed to hand you this before I ever said my own name out loud. That was the whole plan."
I stared at the envelope. "Why didn't you?"
He was quiet for a long beat. "Because I was afraid that once you read it, you'd only ever see him whenever you looked at me."
I picked up the envelope. The paper had gone thin and soft with age, but the seal was still unbroken.
Outside, a car door slammed. Then another.
I looked up at Nathan — at this man whose name I was only just learning after two years — and I said the only true thing left in me.
"I need you to go. I need to read this by myself."
He nodded once. He walked the length of the aisle, and at the door he stopped, one hand braced against the frame, not turning around.
"His name was Wesley James Hale," he said. "He was the best person I ever knew. And he loved you first. I just loved you longer."
May you like
The door swung shut behind him.
I sat down on the altar step in my wedding dress, and I opened the letter.
