My heart beat rapidly, and my breath had caught. Again, so much information all at once. I tried to picture my own mother, suffering from depression after having me, maybe feeling stuck, and then... maybe after I had been given away, she died. Or was it she died and then I was sent to my father? It was hard to be certain without asking.

  And who was I to ask?

  Was that when my grandmother left her husband? To live alone, but still married to each other?

  My grandmother had wanted me. Her husband, my grandfather, had not. For whatever reason. Somehow, perhaps in his paranoid, and strange ways, he had broken up his own family with one decision. Even his son didn’t seem happy with him.

  Would I ever get the true answers? Did it matter? The tragedy of it all darkened my spirit as I sat there, in my grandmother’s house.

  How my life could have been very different if he had just left me with my mother.

  How could my grandmother still love him?

  Shouldn’t I be angry with him, too?

  Charlotte returned with a cookie plate and some cups of milk on a tray. “These were on clearance at the store today.”

  “Oh those are the good ones,” Grace said, pretending she hadn’t been saying anything. “So nice you’re staying with the old coot anyway. Just don’t let him near any guns if you have any yourselves. He’s a bit dangerous.”

  Gabriel gritted his teeth as he spoke. “Might have seen he had one...”

  Charlotte and Grace seemed to gasp in unison.

  “He’s not supposed to,” Charlotte said.

  “It’s those robbers,” Gabriel said. “We’ll have to do something about it. He doesn’t feel safe, so I don’t blame him. Not sure where he got the guns though.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Around here, he probably bought them off of an old friend. Especially if he told them about the robbery, or if he just wanted one. He can be really charming, so his friends would probably help him out.”

  “The crazy old bat,” Grace said.

  Charlotte nodded in agreement.

  The more they talked, the more they were concerned about his mental health, and for our welfare staying with him. Grace was a little more harsh, a little more judgmental. It was Charlotte who seemed sad and distant every time her husband was mentioned, and often called him the love of her life, despite her fears of him.

  It was difficult to find questions to get Charlotte to tell us more about my mother. We were prying a lot for being strangers she didn’t know ten minutes ago. The more we spoke, she got more interested in talking about her schoolchildren and her teaching days and about what Winchester was like.

  And yet... I wasn’t sure if I needed to know any more.

  Maybe there really was an epidemic of tragedy in this town.

  Maybe I was digging into secrets best left buried. Nothing I learned would bring my mother back. Nothing they could say would make me feel different, at least I thought.

  They had let me go. And while it was clear they both still grieved, it was still considered the past.

  I was the past to everyone here.

  To Break Us, It Makes Us

  Gabriel

  Gabriel was a bundle of nerves by the time they finally got back to the car. Sang had barely spoken inside Charlotte’s house.

  Not that he blamed her. Maybe trying to do this all at once was a bad idea. Maybe they should take a break after securing her grandfather’s house. Yeah, maybe they needed to stay, but... Sang was going to go into a major depression after all this. He was about to and it wasn’t even his family.

  Gabriel, however, was angry. Every fiber inside of him was angry at the old man.

  Giving away Sang.

  He wasn’t totally sure, but he was trying to piece it together how and why Brian would do such a thing. There had to be some reasoning. Maybe he was morally offended by his daughter being impregnated at a young age, and thought he was doing the right thing by sending Sang off with her father. Maybe because her father had moved far away enough, and as there were no pictures of baby Sang, they were trying to keep it a secret. So Sang’s mother could come back to society at the time and not be judged for having a baby so young.

  Maybe it was a combination of things.

  Gabriel hadn’t realized how Sang’s father must have cheated on his wife way back then. Or had he really forced himself on his younger cousin?

  And when Sang’s mother was forced to give up the baby...

  Gabriel shook off the thought. They didn’t have all the details, just clues. But he was still angry with Brian Sorenson. No wonder his family practically abandoned him. Maybe he was crazy, but this was unforgivable.

  He couldn’t imagine a good enough reason for it.

  No. They needed to get that information they came for, and then get out of town. They’d secure the house, but they didn’t have to stay. It was hard to want to.

  Gabriel started the car and pulled around the block before he spoke. “Sang...”

  She didn’t say anything, and when Gabriel caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, she was blinking rapidly.

  He pulled the car over, put it in park and reached for her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She continued to blink a lot but she didn’t cry. She turned to him though and nestled her head into his shoulder.

  Gabriel held her, burying his nose into her hair at the top of her head. He didn’t mind the scent of the stupid hair coloring still lingering in every lock. He just needed to hold her. She sighed heavily into him.

  “We don’t have to do anything now,” he murmured. “Do you want to—”

  “I don’t think I can tell them,” she whispered. “She seems happy. How could I tell her? How could I invade her life?”

  Oh. He hadn’t even realized she might have been considering that just yet. “You don’t have to.”

  “She cried to even just talk about me. Or my mother.” She took another deep breath into his shoulder. “She found a way to be happy without me. I feel like we’re forcing her to look at a past she might have wanted to forget about.”

  “But what about you, Sang?” Gabriel asked. He rubbed at the side of her head, running fingers through her soft hair. He kissed the crown of her head before continuing to snuggle against her. “Sang, you’re not considering your own happiness. What do you want to know?”

  “I...” She faltered and her voice cracked. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to answer now,” he said. “We’re here for you, not them, okay? As much as I want to be delicate, you’re here for answers, and you probably deserve a few, at least the ones that matter the most. Then we can go, and they can forget about you again if they’d like. They did it once.”

  She didn’t seem as confident as he did about this answer. Maybe it wasn’t the right way to approach it.

  But didn’t she deserve answers if she wanted them? What kind of man sends a baby off with her mother’s rapist? Splitting them apart and... what happened after. Destroying his entire family.

  It made absolutely no sense.

  His breath caught suddenly. He blinked rapidly, pulling away from Sang a little. “There has to be a reason,” Gabriel said. “This whole mess... it’s all so convoluted. There’s no fucking way... I mean there’s no way... that your grandfather would just...” He pursed his lips hard for a second, grinding his teeth. “God, shit... I mean... shish.”

  He was trying not to curse again. For her sake. Not when she seemed so stressed.

  He couldn’t believe it. There was something more that happened. Something that occurred that changed everything for everyone. Sang going to her father’s to live wasn’t a decision just made out of pride or made lightly under any circumstances.

  They were all miserable about it, so why?

  “Don’t give up yet, Sang,” he said, when he realized she’d been waiting for him to talk and he simply stopped. “There’s pieces of this puzzle that are missing. It’ll all make sense. We just have to find it.”

  They couldn’t leave without it. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll find solutions that stopped them all from suffering.

  ♥♥♥

  Despite Gabriel suggesting they needed a break, Sang said she’d feel better working on Gabriel’s family for now.

  “We have hours to go,” she said. “Let’s not spend any more time on me today. North and Silas are at the farm, so it’s safe. We could spend a few hours doing something else.”

  And maybe it was for the better. She needed time to think about something else for a while.

  Gabriel and Sang spent at least a half hour in the car together trying to navigate to the address that Gabriel’s ex-aunt gave him for his other uncle.

  No dice. The address he’d been given, after Gabriel spoke to the owner of the house, had been purchased in the last couple of years. No idea where the sellers were and they couldn’t remember their names.

  “We’ve got one more shot,” Gabriel said. “She’d said there was a bottling company and he worked there. I guess I could go ask her which one.”

  “If you don’t want to bother her, it’s a small town,” Sang said. “There can’t be that many.”

  Even when they found the right one, the Ale-8 Bottling Company, they were out of luck.

  “Leo’s out on his route,” the manager said. He gave a questioning look at the two of us. “You his kids? Aren’t you supposed to be in school right now?”

  It was the first time they’d been questioned like that. Gabriel gave a cheesy grin. “It was a half day for us.”

  The manager didn’t ask any further, but he seemed eager to get them out the door.

  When they had returned to the car, Gabriel took the beanie off his head and fluffed out his hair. “Well, at least I have the right place.”

  Sang didn’t answer, and instead gazed out the window at the bottling company. “Should we stick around? Wait for him to return this afternoon?”

  “The manager might come out and ask us to leave before then,” he said. “Or he might call the cops if we stay for too long. We’re probably suspicious enough.”

  Suddenly Sang sat upright and turned to him, touching his bicep through the coat. “Call Pam.”

  “What?” Gabriel asked. “Why?”

  “I was supposed to get you to call her. See if you can’t encourage her to get away from Clay once more. They said she seemed reluctant, and they think it’s because you’re not there.”

  Gabriel frowned. At the rate this was going, it’d be a while before he could get back.

  Gabriel tilted his head back, closing his eyes for a moment. He didn’t want to, but he took out the phone and dialed the number.

  She answered in a couple of rings.

  “It’s me,” Gabriel said.

  Pam coughed or laughed into the phone, Gabriel wasn’t sure which. “Oh now you call me back?”

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said. “It’s been busy.” He stopped himself and redirected. “No, sorry. Listen. I’m sorry about what I said before...”

  “Why?” she said in an angry tone.

  Gabriel paused for a long time. She never had that kind of attitude with him. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry. Are you that mad at me?”

  “Oh I don’t know, Gabriel. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m really tired of the men in my life trying to tell me what to do or even worse, not tell me when they’re going off to college in Kentucky.”

  “I don’t know if I’m doing that!”

  “Then why are you there?” Pam asked. “And why am I suddenly getting phone calls from Ste-e-eve?” She spit out the name. “Asking me about this damn trailer?”

  Gabriel choked. “What? When did he call?”

  “You know, your father left me with so much debt because he paid for so much shit with credit cards and sent his brother so much money,” Pam snapped into the phone. She kept going, and it was like she wasn’t even talking to Gabriel any more, she was just venting into the universe. “And who paid for the damn things in the end? A lot of it was left to me since we were married. And did Ste-e-eve offer to pay for any of it? No.”

  “Pam...”

  “And did Ste-e-eve offer to help with the funeral costs at all? No.”

  “Pam,” Gabriel said gently again.

  “And did Ste-e-eve do anything except harass me to sell the trailer and send him the money for it? No. He just demanded I sign off on nearly everything or threatened me and you and everyone if he didn’t get what he wanted.”

  Was it all true? In his heart, he believed her. From what Gabriel had seen, Uncle Steve was nice on the surface, but there were some clear issues. Gabriel blew a breath into the phone. “Pam.”

  That didn’t stop her. But Gabriel, slowly, heard every bit about how Uncle Steve had made life for her miserable for being married to his brother.

  “I don’t know how your father even put up with him!” she finally said before she stopped and took her first breath in several minutes. “And you want to leave me for that?”

  Gabriel hesitated a second, because he was sure she was going to keep going, but when she paused long enough that there was silence on the line, Gabriel gently tried to start, “No, but—”

  “I don’t need you!” she screeched. “I don’t need Clay. I don’t need Bubbles. I don’t need anyone!”

  The line disconnected. She hung up.

  Bubbles? He assumed that was Mr. Buble, but what had he done to tick her off that badly?

  Sang bared her teeth, like she wanted to grimace but she was also frowning at the same time. “What happened?”

  “No fucking clue...” Gabriel said, really puzzled. Apparently, it was a bad time. And the jig was up. Steve managed to call her somehow. Was it the number he left with his ex? Or did he have it before and being here stirred up him calling her?

  And suddenly realizing he’d cursed again, he picked up his head and said, “I mean... fudge.”

  Sang’s light eyebrow lifted slowly. “Are you okay?”

  “She’s probably just upset about something. She might have broken up with Clay already and is upset and I called at a really bad time.”

  “No, I mean... why do you keep not cursing?”

  She noticed. And maybe because of the crazy day, he shook his hands rapidly and then raked his hair back hard away from his eyes. “I don’t fucking know anymore. I was trying to make you feel better. I keep screwing up.” The feeling intensified. Suddenly he was blurting out everything as rapidly as Pam had done. “Pam’s mad at me. Steve called her, probably because of me. I can’t find my own fucking other uncle to ask him anything. I pissed off North yesterday. I can’t keep my mouth clean. I’m not even supposed to be here.” He slapped both palms against the steering wheel. “I can’t... fucking... do anything...” With every word, he slapped and hit the wheel.

  At least until the wheel fell off in his lap.

  This shocked the both of them. They stared in silence at it. Both mouths wide open. It was only the outer wheel, which Gabriel hadn’t realized had been pretty loose, and whatever screw that had been holding it in place snapped.

  Gabriel picked it up, temporarily horrified.

  Sang broke out into a smile and started giggling.

  “You broke it,” she said in a cute tone.

  Gabriel rocked his head back and let out a guttural noise from his throat.

  And then he started laughing, too.

  In that instant, the whole air around them changed. He’d never yelled around her before. Not to vent like he had been doing. Now he felt completely ridiculous for doing so.

  She giggled so hard her eyes watered with tears. She wiped at her eyes as she spoke. “I don’t know why you stopped cursing. I like it when you do it.”

  “What?” he said between chuckles. “What do you mean you like it?”

  “Well, I don’t curse but when you do it, it’s usually funny.”

  “...Funny?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She swallowed once and breathed in deep to get herself to stop giggling. “Like Kota never does. North does but only when he’s angry. You just curse whenever, even when you’re really happy. It’s just you. And most of the time it’s funny.”

  He hadn’t realized she might have liked it.

  “Well shit,” he said. And then with a grin he leaned in a little and said, “Shit, shit, fuck, fuck, shit.”

  She started giggling again.

  It was the first time he’d seen her really laugh in the last few days.

  That smile. God, he loved it. And the way her eyes teared up when she was really happy and in a giggle fit.

  He loved the shit out of her.

  ♥♥♥

  They needed a break, so they figured out how to duct tape the wheel back together. With a few hours to kill, Gabriel did a driving tour of Winchester, taking roads they hadn’t been on, exploring neighborhoods.

  It was a nice town. There was a very nice new library that seemed to be busy for a Friday afternoon. The main strip in Winchester had a couple of grocery stores, hotels near the interstate, and plenty of bars and restaurants. Small, the main city strip maybe was a few miles long before it faded away on either side in exchange for grassy hills and farms.

  Eventually Gabriel found a little farmer’s market that was still open, despite it being winter. He pulled over for it. “Let’s walk around a little.”

  Sang followed him, getting out of the car. The air was chilled and while it had grayed, there still wasn’t any snow yet.

  It’d do her some good to get a little exercise and get away from everything.

  Like a date.

  Maybe this could be a date. He hadn’t even thought about it yet, but maybe now was a good time.

  Beech Springs Farm Market was very cute, with a small white building and a very wide front blacktop drive. There were a handful of tables condensed and sitting close to the building, and they held mostly packaged vegetables out on display, able to withstand the cold temperatures. It was easy to see how it’d likely have loads of fresh veggies and flowers during the summer months. Most of the empty tables further away from the market held outdoor statuettes and décor meant for Valentine’s Day.