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Brooks held out a key. “He wanted you to have this.”
It was the Superman insignia key Trent had found.
Hunter glared at Brooks. “Get rid of that dang key. The gold only causes trouble in our lives, and I’m so done with it.” With that, he hurried to leave.
Kensi moved to embrace Liberty, who was crying into Ava’s shoulder. The whole scene was more than tragic. It was unbearable.
Cheryse watched him go, also teetering on the verge of emotional collapse. Right or wrong, she had to comfort Hunter. It was the only way she could comfort herself.
* * *
After they watchedHunter storm away, Cheryse couldn’t bring herself to go to the Stone Family Inn with everyone else. Ava kept telling her to come with them, promising that there was food and claiming that Hunter would eventually show up back at the inn and they could all grieve together. But Cheryse didn’t want to grieve together. She gave Liberty a long hug, then left, hoping to find Hunter.
She drove around town, keeping her eyes peeled, but he was nowhere to be found.
Sometime later, she sat in her little home on Fourth Street, four blocks down from her downtown spa. The blinds were closed, and the darkness reflected the way she felt. She sat at the kitchen table and listened as the little flower clock ticked in time with her thoughts.Trent. Trent. Trent. Hunter. Hunter. Hunter.
Her heart thudded. Where could he be?
Pushing herself to her feet, she moved to the kitchen sink and grabbed a glass off of the counter. She filled it with water and sipped slowly, trying to calm herself.
He would show up. Eventually, he would end up back at the inn. But …
She focused on her porch. Now that it was June, her garden and herbs were in full bloom. She not only prided herself on her spa, but she’d also been working on top-notch herbal remedies, the same ones her mother had used years ago.
Slowly, Cheryse took off her high heels, the veil, and even the coat she’d thrown over her summer dress. It was a black summer dress, but she still wore it to the salon with an assortment of yellow, blue, or red jewelry when she wanted to look classy.
She opened her sliding glass door and walked out onto the porch. With her water pail in hand, she walked the circuit of assorted plants and gave them each a drink.
Breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly.
She had to keep herself calm. Wasn’t that what Roger had told her this morning on the phone when she’d been crying?Keep yourself calm, Cheryse. No one likes to see people fall apart at funerals.
Anger stabbed through her chest, but she suppressed it. She shook her head. Today wasn’t about Roger and his annoying ways. Well, his jab didn’t feel so little today, but she knew it was partly because of how awful she had been feeling since she’d heard about Trent.
She sucked in a long breath and thought about Roger. They’d been dating a long time, and he kept pushing her to go to the next level. She’d told him she wasn’t ready, but the truth was that she’d almost changed her mind before …
Trent.
Her vision blurred, and she carefully pruned her strawberry plant, taking the dead leaves and pinching them before throwing them off the side of the porch. She couldn’t imagine that she would ever recover from losing her friend.
She let herself cry for a while, let the grief sweep over her. When there were no more tears to shed, her thoughts flitted back to Roger. Anger replaced the grief. She would deal with Roger and his stupid comment another time. When he was in town. Here. With her.
His job took him out of town a lot, and it hadn’t been a problem. Truthfully, Roger wasn’t the most popular person to take to a funeral. He didn’t belong there. It just smarted the way Roger acted like having feelings in public was a problem.
But Roger was a good guy. He was. The guy raised money for disenfranchised causes. He was so good-natured, and he was really great to her.
A little niggling voice in her head reminded her that Trent and Hunter didn’t like him. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot with him, and let’s face it: they would never have liked him anyway. It just wasn’t in the cards for Trent or Hunter to approve of any guy she dated, especially after everything that had happened with her husband.
She sighed and focused on the next strawberry bush. It relaxed her, but her mind kept going back to Trent. There would be no avoiding Trent and his memory today. Or Hunter, for that matter. Their lives were tied together with her own.
Even when they were all little, Mama Stone had come to Cheryse’s mother’s spa, and she’d always brought the twins with her to play. Cheryse would make them have tea parties and they would make her play pirates. She was always given the role of the damsel in distress, jumping off some chair to represent a plank as they pushed her into the water. Well, one of them would push her while the other would save her. They would fight over that, too.
She sniffled as she remembered those days. Carefully, she pulled some dead flower ends off and scrunched them up in her fingers.
When she had come back to South Port a little over two years ago, she’d decided that she would reopen her mother’s salon, which had made her mother so happy. She had also decided she would do what she’d come to love best after leaving here: she would garden. She didn’t have much space, and everything grew in pots, but it was something.
Gardening had been her only solace throughout her first marriage with Joe, before … before she’d accidentally killed him.
