The Snow Angel (8 page)

“Cyrus is going to be gone for a while.” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice, but Max looked up sharply all the same.

“Where is he going?”

I feigned nonchalance. “He’s picking up some used cars.”

“Shouldn’t take too long. Here, spread this out for me.” Max motioned toward a bolt of jet-black silk that we were transforming into a formal, double-breasted suit coat.

Grabbing the smooth rectangle of cloth, I unwrapped several yards and let it pool on the table.

“It’ll just be nice not to have to worry about tiptoeing around the house for a few days.”

“You haven’t told him about our arrangement yet?”

I snuck a peek at Max and found myself trapped in his knowing gaze. “No,” I said, deflating a little. “Of course not. He can’t know.”

Max opened his mouth. Shut it again. Then he sighed and stood up straight, pressing his fists to the small of his back and rolling out his broad shoulders. “Rachel, Rachel,” he murmured. “Will you ever be done?”

He wasn’t talking about the suit.

In the week that I had been working with Max, he had never pried into the particulars of my marriage or brought up the strange and heartbreaking edict that Cyrus had passed almost immediately after I said, “I do.” It was the elephant in the room, the boulder between us that kept everything sweet and surfacey instead of deep and meaningful like it had been with the Wevers when I was a kid.
I didn’t like pretending that nothing was wrong, but in all the years that I had been with Cyrus I had never spoken to anyone about what it was like to be his wife. My secrets were buried deep, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to resurrect them.

And yet, Max’s one question was teeming with memories. It unleashed a barrage of dangerous emotions that threw me off guard. Will you ever be done? The first time that Max said a version of those words to me was on my wedding day.

I was eighteen years old when I fell in love with Cyrus, and nineteen when we were married. It was a hasty affair, and people were right when they assumed that it was a shotgun wedding. But there was never any evidence of our indiscretion—I lost our first baby to miscarriage only a few weeks after Cyrus and I said our vows. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if things would have been different if that baby we never knew had never been. Would I have married Cyrus? Or would I have listened to Max and run as fast and as far as I could?

Max and Elena tried to talk me out of marrying Cyrus up until the last possible moment. At first my surrogate father had even refused to walk me down the aisle, saying that my real dad deserved the honor. But my dad hated Cyrus, and the feeling was more than mutual. I knew that I could have one or the other—my dad or the love of
my life—not both. I had already made my decision, and I would have given myself away to Cyrus if that’s what it came down to. In the end, Max relented, but standing in the back of the church as we watched the bridesmaids disappear one by one, he made one last-ditch effort to convince me that I was making the biggest mistake of my life.

“He’s controlling,” Max whispered. His voice was tense and urgent.

“Cyrus’s not controlling,” I said, patting Max on the arm. We were linked at the elbows, our heads bent together as if we were having a final, tender moment on the most momentous day of my life. Anyone who saw us would think we were sharing a dream for my future. “He’s protective.”

“He’s manipulative.” Max all but growled.

“He wants what’s best for me.”

“He’s dangerous.”

I laughed a little at that. Cyrus wasn’t dangerous. He was exciting and passionate and the perfect amount of wild. There was something brooding and untamed just below the surface, but I loved that side of him. He made me feel intoxicated. Alive.

It seemed that Max could read my mind. He squeezed my hand. “Rachel, honey, I don’t trust him.”

“I trust him with my life.” The words rolled off my tongue, but even as I said them I wondered if they were
true. I was certainly attracted to Cyrus, and we loved each other enough to make a baby, but there was only one man I trusted with my life and he was standing beside me. But I couldn’t say any of that. Not when the string quartet began to play the Wedding March and the congregation rose to their feet for my entrance.

I took a deep breath and snuck a peek at Max. He was devouring me with his eyes, his expression pained and desperate. I saw the storm that raged inside him, but just when I feared he was going to whisk me out of the church and away from the man I was about to marry, he pulled me into a rough embrace. “You let me know when you’re done,” he whispered into my hair.

It was a bewildering statement, but I didn’t have time to ponder it. The doors to the sanctuary opened for us, and Max and I began our slow march down the aisle.

The processional seemed to take a lifetime, and the closer I got to Cyrus the farther away I felt from everything I knew. I wasn’t regretting my decision as much as I was stunned that I had chosen to ignore Max and Elena—and my father—when they tried to share their reservations about Cyrus Price. What if they were right? What if instead of wedded bliss my future only held a time when this would all be over? When I would be done?

It couldn’t be. Everyone else had to be wrong. I didn’t deserve Cyrus, he was too good for a blue-collar girl like
me. A girl who came from such brokenness. And still, there he stood at the front of the church, watching me come with a lopsided, knowing smirk. I blushed at the fire in his eyes, the surfer-boy sweep of his sandy hair, and the sharp line of his angled jaw. He was beautiful, and he was mine.

By the time Max and I reached the end of the long aisle, I was nearly bursting with anticipation. Marrying Cyrus was my own fairytale come true, and Max’s words were all but forgotten when my groom reached for my hand. But before Max let me go, he leaned toward Cyrus and gave him a sort of one-armed embrace. The three of us were pulled into a huddle, a place where the only thing we could hear was the sound of our own breathing. I’m sure it was a touching sight for all of our family and friends gathered in the pews.

It wasn’t touching from where I stood. Max glared at Cyrus and Cyrus glared back. Then my gray-haired defender gave my soon-to-be husband a crisp smile and said, “I’m watching you.”

In the circle of their arms, there was a split second of hushed silence. Less than a heartbeat of stillness during which Cyrus’s eyes flinted with something that looked very much like fear. I could almost imagine him as a little boy, caught redhanded in the act of doing something deplorable. And Max had his number. But just as quickly as
the expression flared, it dulled. Cyrus licked his lips as if he longed to spit at Max’s feet, but instead he turned to me. He gave me a brilliant, heart-stopping smile and pulled me toward him. My fingers slipped from Max’s arm, and just like that my fate was sealed.

The rest of the ceremony was a blur, but I’ll never forget what Cyrus said the moment we burst through the back doors of the church. Birdseed anointed our heads and the train of my hand-stitched dress was thrown over my arm so that I could run down the steps and into my new life. I was so caught up in the music and the tears, the vows we had shared, that I had all but forgotten Max and what he had said. But Cyrus hadn’t. My toe hadn’t yet graced the first stair when Cyrus put his mouth to my ear and whispered viciously, “You will never speak to that man again. Ever.”

Never. The word cut like a knife, slicing away what had been and what would be. Separating me from the closest thing I had to a father. Cyrus had already put the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with my dad. Now this?

In the beginning I thought that Cyrus would soften. That there would come a day when he would realize that he had been overreacting, and that Max and Elena meant the world to me. But he didn’t back down. Even when I lost the baby and couldn’t stop crying for days, he refused to let me see the couple that I considered my family.

So I lied. I snuck out to see them, and when Cyrus found out he hit me.

It was the first time he ever raised a hand against me, and though the unanticipated blow lashed straight through my wounded heart, I understood why he did it. I had defied him, hadn’t I? I had done the one thing he asked me not to do.

It was a slap. Nothing, really.

Maybe Max thought I would run then. Maybe he thought I would be done. But I had been hurt before. I think Max underestimated my ability to pick myself up and keep going. Done? Far from it.

But now, over a decade later, to hear my surrogate father say those words stirred something savage inside me. I didn’t even know that I could feel that way, that I could be filled with a longing so raw and unexpected that it brought tears to my eyes. Bowing my head over the sewing table, I took a shuddering breath.

“I know who he is,” Max said softly. “I see what he does. Please, Rachel. You don’t have to live like this. You know that, don’t you?”

I shook my head as if to clear it. “I have a daughter now,” I said. “Lily needs her dad.”

“Not like this.” Max moved around the table and reached a hand out for me. His fingers brushed the fabric of my sweater for just a moment before he seemed to accept that
I wouldn’t respond to his touch. That I was unreachable. He changed tactics. “He still hits you, doesn’t he?”

“Not really,” I said. “Not often.”

“Rachel, abuse is abuse—”

“I am not an abused woman.” My voice was flinty, furious. “Don’t you dare make me out to be some weakling.”

“I don’t think you’re weak. I think you’re strong,” Max said. “But it kills me to see you like this. And I can’t stand the thought that he dares to raise a hand against you.”

All the fight went out of me in one long exhalation. “He’s just a big bully, Max. He likes to get his way and when things don’t go as planned he overreacts. I know how to deal with him. Besides, what would you have me do? Leave?”

“Exactly.”

I shook my head at that. “Where would I go? What would I do? I have a high school education and zero credentials. Everything and everyone I know is here. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t.”

“But you could—”

The sound of Lily’s backpack hitting the floor behind us cut Max off so quickly he seemed to inhale whatever it was he was about to say. We both spun around, shocked that we had let the time get away from us, and downright sickened to realize that even if she hadn’t heard our entire conversation, Lily had heard enough of it.

“Lil, honey,” I said, taking a tentative step toward her. “How long have you been standing there?”

Her face was stricken, her mouth a thin, serious line. She stumbled backward a bit and bumped into the doorframe.

“Listen to me, Lily. You overheard a conversation that wasn’t meant for your ears. I know you don’t understand, but you have to believe me—”

“Believe you?” Lily’s eyes went wide. “Believe you? You’re a liar!” She whipped around and flew out the back room of the bridal shop, letting the steel door slam behind her.

December 24, 10:00
A.M.

T
he atrium is warm and bright, filled with the contented hum of activity. There is a TV on in the corner, and there are little knots of people congregating around tables and in carefully arranged nooks. Mitch’s eyes flick past the shuffleboard table and pause for a moment on the aviary that takes up the entire south wall. It’s impossible not to admire the tiny birds and the way they make the air seem to shimmer with their songs. But though the birds are lovely, Mitch would rather watch the residents.

Three of the elderly inhabitants of The Heritage
Home are with their visiting families. One gentleman—the one closest to where Mitch stands—is smiling as he unwraps a Christmas present. It’s a misshapen clay bowl, the sort of handmade work of art that is worth far more than diamonds or pearls. The little girl who made it grins as she points out its various attributes, and when her grandfather tells her that her gift is beautiful, just what he wanted, she throws her arms around his neck. Whispers loud enough for Mitch to hear, “I love you.”

Those words stab through Mitch and leave him breathless. How long has it been since he’s made so bold, so life-changing a declaration? Since he’s heard it? He can’t remember.

“I brought the chess board in case you’re up for it.”

Mitch turns to find a well-dressed man at his elbow. He can feel his brow furrow in confusion, but before he can formulate a polite question the man smiles.

“Cooper,” he says. “We were going to play a game.”

“I don’t know how to play chess.” Mitch gives the perplexing bag of stone pieces a furtive glance. For some reason he knows that the carved tokens are pawns and knights, rooks and royalty. But he can’t imagine what they are supposed to do.

“Good thing I brought the checkers, too.” Cooper spins his hand and reveals a second cloth bag. This one is filled with red and black disks.

“I don’t think I know how to play checkers either.”

“It’s easy. I can teach you in less than five minutes. You’ll probably mop the floor up with me.”

Mitch lets himself be led to a small table near a span of floor-to-ceiling windows. The day is soft and gray, muted with the silence of a storybook snowfall. It is a lovely sight, but one look at the gentle storm and Mitch knows that the roads will be a nightmare in no time at all. The plows simply won’t be able to keep up with the volume.

“I drove a plow,” Mitch says, staring out the window.

“You had a plow attached to the front of your work truck,” Cooper amends. He lays out the checkered board between them and begins to methodically place the red playing pieces on the black squares in front of him. “You could bolt the plow blade on in the winter, and take it off in the summer. It was a side job.”

“A side job?”

“A way to make some extra cash. Construction slows down a lot in the winter, you know.”

Construction. Mitch looks at his hands and is warmed by the certainty that he was good at what he did. The corner of his mouth tweaks as his body remembers what it was like to jump from one roof truss to the next. He had amazing balance. He could walk from one side of an unfinished building to the other, skimming the narrow boards with his feet and never once catching anything for
support. A part of him would like to tell Cooper this, but the stranger beats him to the punch.