1. Prologue
1824 Words
1
PROLOGUE
RHETT
Darkness lay outside the large windows of my new bedroom, and silence had long since fallen throughout the rest of the house.
Ten-thirty, my alarm clock read, much too late for a twelve-year-old to be up according to Mom.
She and Dad slept in the master suite on the floor below me while I sat cross-legged on my bed, unable to relax after a day of lugging boxes up three flights of stairs.
My parents had moved us three towns south the day after I’d finished the seventh grade, and I missed the comfort of my old bedroom, the safe place I could hide in to ensure I didn’t disappoint them.
The four walls of my supposed new escape surrounding me didn’t put me at ease. Rather, they seemed to push inward, threatening the stoicism that had been ingrained in my head at too young of an age.
Instead of thinking about the strange, unsettled feeling inside my stomach, I forced my mind toward easing my tension…and a way to flee from the disquiet of a bedroom that didn’t feel like home.
A plan formed in my head, giving me something to focus on, and I snagged hold of it.
Stomach tight and hands clammy, I hopped up, tugged on my sneakers, and quietly crept into the hallway. No lights shone from the stairwell, so I slipped down a flight and held my breath.
My parents didn’t make a peep from behind their closed bedroom door.
One last scurry down another set of stairs, and I stood in the massive house’s entryway.
Dad had already quizzed me on the alarm system, so I snuck outside into the warm night air with no one the wiser, filling my lungs for what seemed like the first time in months since I’d learned we were moving closer to Boston.
Dad’s new job came with a lot more money, and even though neither of my parents showed much emotion, both seemed quite pleased to have climbed higher in the ladder.
Me? Not so much. I didn’t care about money, cars, and being someone. I just wanted peace and quiet—but more than the fake kind that had always lay over our house.
Sure, with only the three of us, home had always been on the silent side. But peace? I didn’t understand the word and hadn’t felt anything but restless for as long as I could remember.
Unless I’d been closed up in my old bedroom.
“And now I don’t even have that anymore,” I muttered to myself, yanking my bike off the ground from where one of the movers had left it alongside the garage.
Settled on the narrow seat, I pedaled down the driveway, intent on getting away from the scene of my newfound misery. Without knowing the neighborhood, I chose left and just kept riding since we’d come into town by that route earlier in the day.
Trees and houses lined the dimly lit road, eventually giving way to thicker woods I remembered that had spread out eastward beyond a large cemetery.
My legs burned after the long hours of climbing stairs with box after box, but I kept pushing until I couldn’t go any further. Heart thundering, I slowed alongside a wrought-iron fence separating me from the graveyard. My pants for air sounded loud in the still night, broken only by a lonely owl somewhere in the distance.
Moonlight shone through the towering maple trees to my left, touching headstones like creepy ghost fingers, but I felt no need to flee.
My insides simply wanted to fold in on themselves.
Crying never solved anything, Dad had always claimed, so be strong and take control over your emotions.
It is what it is, Mom had declared the last time I’d had her arms around me at age seven when I’d buried my puppy that had been hit by a car.
One final tear had escaped my eye that day, and I’d been nothing but stoic and proper since then, which pleased both my parents.
A hiccupped sob sounded in the night, and I held my breath, straining my ears in the darkness.
Another soft cry turned my focus back toward the cemetery, and I slowly pedaled forward, my tires near silent on the cracked sidewalk beneath them. A break in the trees revealed a wide expanse of open field dotted with dark stones, some tall and monstrous, others short and leaning from age.
The crying grew louder as I approached the entrance. A double gate sat closed and locked, flanked on either side by towering stone pillars.
A bike leaned on its kickstand in front, the paved driveway on the other side leading deep into the cemetery’s gloom.
I parked my bike alongside the one that stood the exact height as mine and pressed my face to the cool bars of the gate, scanning the area beyond.
Someone huddled with their back to me in front of a headstone off to the right. Arms wrapped around their legs, and head bowed, they shivered, their shoulders shaking as cries reached for me like a magnet to my ironclad heart.
A strange ache moved over my chest, and I rubbed at my shirt, trying to soothe it away.
Frowning, I tilted my head back and eyed the gate in front of me.
It stood too tall to climb.
But the fence beyond, the tree alongside where the person’s bike sat—its branches crept over into the graveyard just as creepily as the beams of moonlight reaching through the leaves.
The boy’s sniffles continued, pulling my focus back on him.
Boy, I had decided, because no middle school aged girl I knew would ever go into such a place alone after dark when everyone else slept.
I eyed the tree. Glanced at the crying boy. Rubbed at my chest for a second time, my feet itching to move closer.
He had gone to see that grave by himself, but I felt he shouldn’t be alone. He needed someone strong beside him while weakness held control over his emotions.
Mind made up, I set a plan in motion that had me scaling the tree, shimmying along a branch until I hovered over green grass, and dropping to the ground.
The boy turned at the thump of my feet behind him but didn’t jump up in startled fear like I’d expected.
Definitely brave…or perhaps he’d already heard me coming.
“Hey.” I moved closer as he swiped his arm over his eyes. I wasn’t about to ask him if he was okay. That would have been a waste of words.
Instead, I stopped beside him, reading the name etched in granite in front of him.
Archer Blackwood.
A quick calculation let me know he’d been dead three years to the day—and that he would have been twelve if he still lived.
I sank onto the hard ground, breathing in the scent of soil, fresh cut grass, and flowers.
The boy beside me sniffled. “He was my brother,” he whispered, sending that weird twinge through my heart again. “My twin.”
Our elbows brushed, sliding a shiver down my arm.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I murmured, looking over at the boy.
Wetness still filled his eyes that appeared as red as his nose in the moonlight shining on us. “Thanks,” he whispered, his voice breaking. He didn’t seem embarrassed by his tears or the show of emotion like I would have been.
But I wasn’t about to put him down like Dad used to do with me all the time.
“I’m Rhett,” I told him but didn’t offer my hand since his clasped around his knees—and I didn’t want either of us moving and breaking the magnetic contact between our bodies.
“Ashton,” he replied quietly.
“What happened to him?” I asked, picking at the grass between our thighs so I wouldn’t grab hold of him like I wanted to and hug his sadness away.
“Leukemia. It’s been three year years, and Mom and my therapist tell me that healing will come, but they didn’t have their other half ripped away from them.” He wiped his nose on his T-shirt at his shoulder, leaving a smear of wetness that should have grossed me out but didn’t. “Even my dad and four older sisters don’t understand.”
I had no clue what it was like to have a twin—or even a sibling.
Heck, not even a close friend since I’d never allowed my emotions free so someone could get to know me beyond the hard shell I hid inside.
That owl hooted again, pulling my gaze off the cold stone for the cemetery’s darkness beyond. The paved road wound through shrubs and what looked like a small chapel in the distance.
A new beginning lay before me like the path that disappeared into the unknown. A new life…
And the family-rich boy beside me seemed just as lost and lonely as I felt deep inside where I smothered all my feelings.
“This and our birthday are the only two days I can’t live in denial he’s gone,” Ashton whispered. “It’s just so much easier pretending he never got sick and died. He was my sunshine, my shoulder to lean on.” The boy released a shuddered sigh and sagged even more like he wanted to sink into the soil and join his twin.
I rarely smiled, so I couldn’t fill up that first part of him he’d lost with his brother. But I sure as hell could offer the second.
“I just moved here, and even though I could never take Ashton’s place in your life, I’d like to be your friend,” I suggested quietly. “And I promise you can lean on me whenever you want.”
Ashton turned and threw his arms around me, clinging to me like he had decided I was his tower of strength.
Warmth flooded through my body, and my eyes stung for the first time since I’d buried my puppy. My throat went tight, and I allowed myself to touch him like I’d longed to do. Hugging him close, I leaned my cheek onto the top of his head as he started to cry again.
He smelled like sweat and dirt, the outdoors…and home.
I closed my eyes and filled my senses with all things Ashton Blackwood, calmness I’d been missing since leaving my old town settling into my bones.
I would be Ashton’s rock, be the stability he needed, I decided in that moment as sure as the breath in my lungs.
And he would be my best friend until we too lay beneath soil and moonlight with nothing but a lonely owl keeping our spirits company.
- Writer
