AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Isobel had meant it when she’d told Darcy she wasn’t afraid of him, though.
Stepping out of the office, she drew nearer to Mr. Nethers. As her shadow drifted over him, she watched the dullness in his eyes sweep clear, the mask of anger fall away. A different man now stood before her from the one who had greeted her at the front door. Or the one she’d seen yelling at Varen in his room—at Bruce in the bookshop.
This man was present. Awake. Aware. Not just an empty suit.
His lips quivered as though he wanted to speak again, but he held back, waiting, it seemed, for Isobel to speak first, to tell him something that would ease his pain.
Nothing she could say held the power to accomplish such a feat.
Still, the sadness—the sheer devastation radiating from him—felt too real to ignore, and though Isobel had wanted to hate him, she found she couldn’t now.
The office door creaked behind her. She sensed Darcy watching, waiting for her cue to step in and play her practiced part of umpire.
The game to win control had already come to an end, though. And in her hand, Isobel held what felt like the final score.
She extended the photo of Mr. Nethers’s son out to him.
“This photograph,” Isobel said. “How closely did you look at it before you framed it?”
His big fist left the wall, and with shaking fingers, he took the picture.
As he looked down at it, tears formed in his eyes. They spilled, falling with audible pops against the stiff, glossy paper. His other hand—so strong and fierce before—quaked as it went to cover his face.
Like a crumbling mountain, Mr. Nethers sank to a sitting position on the top stair.
Darcy brushed past Isobel, a whiff of expensive-smelling perfume wafting after her. Kneeling next to her husband, she draped an arm around his shoulders, whispering words Isobel couldn’t decipher.
But Varen’s father said nothing. He didn’t ask any more questions, and he didn’t look up. He only hung his head and sobbed.
Palpable, his remorse pulsed through the air, chiseling into Isobel’s own heart to strike a resonating chord there.
Regret was a feeling she had grown to know well.
Thick, heavy, suffocating—it was the one sensation that came closest to what it felt like to die.
“I’m sorry,” Isobel murmured, and it wasn’t until she’d uttered the words aloud that she realized why she’d done so: She wished she could tell her parents the same thing.
She had come here hoping to dig up the skeletons of Varen’s past. But in her attempt to gain understanding, to find out why the one person who should have cared for him the most had left him, she was instead reminded how badly absence itself could hurt. How much damage it could inflict.
Isobel wondered if she could ever accuse her own mother and father of what, in essence, she’d accused the Netherses of. Of not having paid enough attention. Of not caring enough until it was too late.
No, she thought. Never.
And still, here she was. Missing. Gone from their lives. Again.
Staring at the hand that clutched the photo of Varen, Isobel recalled the way her own father had squeezed her shoulder the previous night, and suddenly, all she wanted was to be back in that moment.
If she could live it again, she would stand up and wrap her arms around her dad and hug him so tight. She would beg him to forgive her. She’d tell him over and over that she loved him.
The school administrators had no doubt called her mom and dad by this point, and right now, wherever her parents were, they had to be going ballistic. Were they out looking for her somewhere? Or, like Varen’s parents, were they teetering on the verge of resigning themselves to the worst?
Her family had suffered through her death once.
She couldn’t put them through that again. No matter what came next, she couldn’t just turn her back on them and walk away, vanish into the dreamworld again without a single word—even if her only other option was to tell them everything.
And why hadn’t she? Why, if they’d been listening?
“I—I have to go,” Isobel murmured, the words meant more for her own ears than for Mr. and Mrs. Nethers.
