“I’m sorry, Mia,” he said quietly. “I’m trying so hard to remember you.”
But maybe this was the right place to try. He glanced toward the bench, then sighed and went over to sit down. He could see Mia’s headstone from there, and he leaned back. The sun was warm, and without a breeze, it almost felt like summer. He was waiting to remember something like he had when he saw his father’s stone—some fragment of memory, some glimpse of her face. But when he thought about her, all he could see were those wedding pictures from the album—the dark-haired woman with the pretty smile. The one who felt like a stranger. But he could remember the wave of grief he’d felt at her funeral. He could remember his own sense of loss.
How selfish did that make him, to only remember her for how her loss had affected him?
God didn’t seem to be answering his prayer for a flood of memories. Instead, Sawyer sat in the quiet, his heart heavy and the sunlight warm against his legs. The minutes slipped by, and he realized that the music had stopped inside the church, and he could hear the rumbling drone of a voice—the preacher, maybe?
“Let me remember her, Lord,” he prayed, but there was no immediate answer.
Footsteps on the cement pathway made him look up, and he saw Olivia. She walked slowly in his direction, then paused when she got closer, giving him a hesitant smile.
“Where are the girls?” he asked.
“There are two teenage girls there who have been feeding them Goldfish crackers. They’re all blissfully happy, teenagers and toddlers alike.”
“Right.” There would be people who knew his daughters better than he did right now.
“I see you found her,” Olivia said.
“Yeah... I did.” He scooted over on the bench a few inches, and Olivia came over and sat down next to him.
“How much do you remember?” she asked.
“Not a lot. I remember the funeral, mostly. Just some snapshots of memory. I’m trying to drag up more, and I’m not having a lot of success.”
“Do you remember me being at the funeral?” she asked.
“No, I don’t remember that. You were there?”
“Of course I was there. She was my best friend.”
Sawyer looked over at Olivia and saw the sadness in her eyes. It was a tempered grief, though. Time had started healing things for her. Had it done the same for him?
“There is one thing I really regret, though,” Olivia went on.
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t come to her grave,” she said, her voice quiet.
“Why not?”
“A lot of people came to her funeral—some of them had been horrible to me. I just wanted to get away, I guess. I shouldn’t have left without seeing it, though. I regretted that.”
Sawyer reached over and took Olivia’s hand in his. Her fingers were soft, and she gave his hand a squeeze. He smiled, looking down at her small, pale hand in his broad, work-hardened palm.
She was a comfort, and he liked having her here with him, this close.
“I guess we’re starting over, you and I,” Sawyer said.
“No, we aren’t,” Olivia said, her voice trembling slightly. She pulled her hand back out of his grip, and he closed his fingers over his empty palm. Had he made a mistake there?
“I shouldn’t have done that—” he started.
“Sawyer, it hasn’t changed,” she said with a shake of her head. “I can’t stay in Beaut.”
He was silent. What would he do when she left again? But he knew he had no right to ask her to stay. She was supposed to be helping him remember his life with Mia. He had no business getting attached to her like this.
“You said there were rumors,” he said. “What kind?”
She looked over at him, her eyes filled with pain. “That I’d slept around. I hadn’t, but no one would believe me. I was the target for every bully and gossip in my senior year of high school. I tried to ignore it, but there were a few boys who were making up these disgusting stories...” She sighed. “And it didn’t change, either, after I graduated. People believe what they want to believe.”
“It’s been a while, though, hasn’t it?” he asked. “People forget. Or lose interest. Or grow up a bit.”
“This town has a long memory.” She sighed. “When I came back to help my mom, I saw one of the girls who’d been awful to me—a grown woman at that point—and she said something snide about women ‘like me.’ It was couched in some Christianly inquiry into how I was doing, and hoping I’d found a husband after all of that. I had to hold myself back from slapping her. You’ve never seen a smugger woman in your life when she looked down at my left hand and saw there was no ring. There are people in life who want nothing more than to watch you fail—and in my life, they all live right here. My mother was dying, and it still didn’t stop.”
“Sounds like plain old bullying,” he said.
She shrugged. He didn’t remember any of this, obviously, but it made his blood simmer to think about that kind of cruelty. Olivia hadn’t deserved that—he was certain. And a so-called Christian woman had rubbed those malicious rumors in her face? It was disgusting.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I wish I could do something—”
“You can’t. And you have nothing to be sorry for,” Olivia said. “You were a break from all of that. But the rest of Beaut owes me more than an apology.”
“Is that why you came out here instead of staying in church?” Sawyer asked.
“No.” She shot him a rueful smile. “I came out because I saw my brother in there. And I panicked.”
Chapter Five
Olivia hunched her shoulders against a chilly breeze. She didn’t like going over those painful memories, but coming back to Beaut seemed to make avoiding them impossible. Besides, those rumors had made things tough on her brother, too. He’d
