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Book Two in the Darien Grace Chronicles
"I couldn't hear the music. I knew that it was pulsing all around me, I could feel it vibrate through the air, but I couldn't hear it. I hadn't been able to hear it for a while now. I ju...
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Darien Grace
I'd never liked hospitals. Actually, I f.ucking despised them. Still, I spent the majority of the summer in the children's ward. Every day Nettie sat waiting for me, two coloring books spread out, taking up the entire craft table. She'd made me promise to come back and visit her after the first day and who was I to say no to the kid? It was like turning your back on a puppy.
Every day I would sit with her for about an hour and every day she would ask the same question. "Veux-tu Écouter Une Chanson?"
"Bien-sûr." (Sure.)
She alternated between a few of the same French lullaby's my own mother had sung to me—the old, almost forgotten melodies springing forward into my memory, and I would be lost. Most days hours would go by before I realized we were sitting in silence, the entire table covered with pages of multicolored bars and notes.
At the end of each day, I would collect the papers retreating to my room at McKenney family home to try and piece the composition together. My room was wallpapered with the pages; a few connected here and others there, with a massive gap directly in the center. Whenever I attempted to finish the piece on my own, my hands would tremble atop the ivory keys, the music failing right at the end of the last crayoned note. The more I tried to finish, the more I felt the music drifting further and further away.
Caleb kept the liquor cabinet under lock and key these days, all the while counting down the moments before the family returned to New York. I hated myself for keeping him here, for being the reason he had to leave the city in the first place. Sure, he'd grown up in this house, but his home was in New York. His heart was there. John had visited for two months directly after the end of term, but he'd returned to the city early to help Caleb prepare for the start of a new semester. A semester that Jas and I were both forced to promise we would finish.
Caleb was counting down the days in earnest; I was begging the Universe to slow. I wasn't ready yet. I couldn't go back. I couldn't be in the same place and time as everything I'd lost. Remnants of him of our Otherwise still littered my heart and mind. Nothing had been able to chase the memories away. Nothing would erase the green eyes and that laugh, always colored with varying degrees of concern, from my dreams. He haunted every aspect of my being.
How the h.ell did Caleb expect me to go back when I could hardly stand to take a single step forward?
With a sigh, I pushed the bench back from the piano and strode into the kitchen. Caleb stood stiffly at the kitchen island, pretending to sip on an empty glass of wine.
"Don't even bother. I heard your sneaky feet patter away from the door," I said. I pulled a glass out of the cabinet, filling it with the wine from the decanter in the middle of the island.
"You know I love it when you play," Caleb said, avoiding my eyes as he placed his own glass in the basin of the sink.
