Braveheart, a love story Read online

  It was glorious on one hand, to make a major life decision for myself . . . but maddening on the other, because I didn’t want to stay unless he wanted me with him. I didn’t want to impose myself on him. For the first time in my life, I was free. I needed to be somewhere that I was wanted.

  “Julian,” I said. “What do you want?”

  He jerked the steering wheel, the tires shrieking as he skidded onto the side of the highway. After putting the car in park, he turned to look at me.

  “What do you think I want?” he demanded, his voice thick with emotion. “But I was fired from my job. I failed at it. I rent a house in the middle of nowhere. I blow glass for a pretty pitiful living. I’m not good enough for you, Ashley. I’m not—”

  “Stop. Please stop telling me why I shouldn’t want you. It hurts.”

  “I’m just trying to say that . . . you can do better than me.”

  “No,” I said softly, “I can’t.”

  And finally—finally—I saw it in his face, at the way he was looking at me like something so beloved, he’d give it up rather than trap it. He loves me, and I am wanted.

  “I love it that you make beautiful things,” I told him, turning his words around. “I love the house that we share. I don’t need you to support me—I just need you to love me. I need you to let me love you.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked me, his hands clenching and unclenching the wheel.

  “All I want,” I said, reaching over to take his hands in mine, “is the life we have together. I don’t know how it’ll look a month from now, or a year from now, or five years from now. I don’t even know who I’ll be five years from now. But right here, right now, all I want . . . is you.”

  He unbuckled his seat belt and mine and pulled me into his arms. “Thank God, thank God, thank God,” he whispered over and over again until his lips found mine, and we made out on the side of the highway. Finally Bruno started barking, telling us he was impatient to go home.

  Home.

  Gus and Jock have rented this house to us on a five-year lease with an annual fee that covers the taxes and nothing else. It’s ours, Jock told us, for as long as we want to live here together. It’s our home, mine and Julian’s, I think as the timer on the kitchen buzzes.

  I place Tig’s journal on the table beside my chair and head inside to take my pies out of the oven.

  Blessed Virgin sent me my diploma in June. Two months ago, in September, I enrolled at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, where I attend college-level classes three days a week.

  One of my favorite things to do is experiment at home. Today’s bounty includes a pumpkin spice pie with a lattice top and an apple–raisin pie with an oatmeal crust. Sometimes I even make baked goods for Jock and Gus to sell at the gallery. Between Julian’s ornaments and my muffins, we’re going to take over the place. Noelle, with her sharp business acumen, approves.

  “Is that pumpkin pie I smell?”

  I turn around and feel it—as I always do—in me, around me, and through me . . . how much I love this man standing behind me.

  “For later,” I say, turning to face him.

  His arms are covered with diamonds, and his eyes are soft with love for me.

  As his hands land on my waist, he drops his lips to mine, but our kiss is short-lived as Bruno sandwiches himself between us.

  “I think someone wants a walk,” says Julian with a chuckle. “Come with us?”

  “Of course.”

  As the porch door swings shut behind us and we leave the spicy smell of waiting pies behind, I lace my fingers through Julian’s and think of how sweet life can be when you are loved, when you are wanted, when you are safe.

  I squeeze his hand and hold on tight.

  My sweet life is just beginning.

  THE END

  BRAVEHEART

  Playlist

  Cinderella (original motion picture soundtrack), Patrick Doyle

  Keep in Touch (music from the motion picture), Gabbi McPhee

  I’ll Be There, Jess Glynne

  We Are Stars, The Pierces

  Must Be Something, The Pierces

  Crazy, Aerosmith

  Dream a Little Dream of Me, The Mamas & the Papas

  Ashokan Farewell, Jay Ungar

  Dans Le Monde Entier, Françoise Hardy

  Are you loving Katy Regnery’s more suspenseful side? Turn the page for an extended excerpt from UNLOVED, a love story!

  (Excerpt from UNLOVED, a love story by Katy Regnery. All rights reserved.)

  PROLOGUE

  Brynn

  My car wouldn’t start.

  That’s how it all began.

  With something as ordinary as a dead battery.

  Turning the key again and again, I was rewarded with silence and finally texted Jem that I wouldn’t make it to the concert. I told him I was sorry. I told him to have a great time. I told him not to wake me up when he got home.

  He didn’t.

  Because he never came home.

  A million times, I’ve returned to that night, to the simple, nothing decisions that started a chain of events in my life leading to today. I think of Jem checking his phone, wondering why I was late. I picture him getting my text and grimacing in disappointment. I see him in my mind, considering whether or not to leave the club and come home to me—or to stay.

  He decided to stay.

  Twenty minutes later, he was dead.

  The shooter left a note saying that he didn’t love or hate the music of Steeple 10. What he hated was the idea of all those people in a club for the same reason: having something in common that they all enjoyed. He didn’t enjoy anything with anyone and was jealous of their communal happiness, their shared appreciation for noise pop. So he opened fire on three hundred people packed into the crowded club, killing thirty-one. Among them, my fiancé, Jem.

  Sometimes, in my dreams, I’m back in my car on that rainy night, and the engine turns over. I drive to the club. I park outside. I see Derrick Frost Willums get out of his 2011 Toyota Corolla, his black trench coat too heavy and too hot for an unseasonably humid August night in San Francisco. In some versions of my dream, I imagine myself intercepting him, talking to him, befriending him, and inadvertently letting him know that he’s not alone. In others, I race into the club, looking frantically over the hot-pink and indigo-blue lights to find Jem’s blond, spiked hair in the crowd. I imagine running to my love and telling him to lie down on the floor with me, since those who quickly dropped to the floor mostly survived. I imagine us huddled together on the filthy, beer-slick floor as bullets rain around us and terrified concertgoers slowly realize what’s happening, darting chaotically in search of cover, slipping in pools of blood, trying desperately to dodge Willums’s relentless rounds of open fire. But mostly, in nine out of ten dreams, I am too late. I see myself sprint, in slow motion, from my car to the club, swinging open the door just in time to see Willums turn the gun on himself, pull the trigger, and fall backward.

  I stand there frozen: a lone, paralyzed figure, unable to help anyone, way too late to save Jem, who probably died instantly from a clean shot to his heart—to his strong, beautiful, bursting-with-love-for-me heart.

  When I wake up, my pillow is drenched with tears and I reach for Jem, hoping that the dream I’ve had is somehow just a horrible nightmare, not the truth, not an actual, outlandish, and still-incomprehensible part of my life. But Jem’s side of the bed is always empty now, as it’s been for almost two years.

  The rest of the world moved on from the Steeple 10 Shooting, ever more numb to the news of similar events, out of sympathy for nameless strangers who meet the same tragic end.

  But I can’t seem to move on.

  I had someone in the crowd that night who had a name, who was dearly loved. Those of us who survived are the walking wounded. Or the walking dead.

  And some of us, even if we never set foot in that club that night, are still somehow there, facing the spray of Willums’s fury with o
ur lost loved ones, and uselessly wishing that everything could have turned out different.

  CHAPTER 1

  Brynn

  Present Day

  Brynn, any chance you’ll be able to complete the website by today? Was hoping to go live this weekend. Please advise. –Stu

  I stare at the e-mail over the rim of my coffee cup, rolling my eyes. When I quoted Stu (of Stu’s Pools) a price of $1,200 to build his website, I was clear that it would take up to three weeks to complete. It’s been ten days and he’s already bothering me to finish?

  “I hate people,” I tell Milo, my four-year-old Siamese cat.

  Purring, he paces back and forth on my desk, between my forearms and the warm keyboard, before falling dramatically atop it. The screen quickly starts to fill with line after line of question marks.

  “I can’t work if you stay there,” I say, taking another sip of coffee.

  “Meow,” he answers, licking his paw. Oh, well. Too bad for you.

  Milo has always been chatty. It was the reason that Jem chose him for me from all of the other kittens at the pet store that day.

  “Now you’ll have someone to keep you company while you work,” he said, handing the cashier his credit card.

  “I don’t need anyone to keep me company,” I pointed out. “I like working alone. Besides, litter boxes aren’t my gig.”

  “I’ll keep it clean,” Jem promised.

  “I don’t want the responsibility of a cat,” I insisted, whining a little.

  “Just let him be your friend. I’ll care for him,” he said, his New England accent strong on the word care, which sounded more like “cay-uh.”

  In the end, that’s what had swayed me—the way his sweet lips said care. It made my toes curl. I’d always had a thing for accents, and as a born-and-bred San Franciscan, I’d fallen for his at the first hello.

  Jeremiah Benton was from Bangor, Maine, a place so far from the Bay area, it may have well been a different country altogether.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked him the first time I ever saw him.

  I was working behind the bar, blown away by the aqua blue of his eyes when he looked up at me, and determined to be nonchalant about how insanely, ruggedly hot he was.

  “Whatever you have on tap there.” Thay-uh.

  “Thay-uh?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow, my lips quirking up.

  “Did you lose an r?” he asked, grinning at me through a scruffy beard.

  “I think you did,” I teased, pulling him a pint of Go West! IPA.

  He chugged down half the beer and swiped at his beard before speaking again, those aqua eyes darkening just a touch as they captured mine. “Sweet girl, I’ll wager I’m gonna lose more than just an r to you by the time this is over.”

  Just like that . . . I was a goner.

  He told me he’d just spent a month hiking in the Sierra National Forest on assignment for Backpacker magazine.

  I told him I’d never been on a hike in my entire life.

  He called me a city slicker and asked me when I was free to take one.

  I had never dated a customer before that day, despite many offers, but I told him I was free the following Saturday.

  He lost an r. I lost my heart.

  “Meow?” asks Milo, pausing in his bath, his blue eyes demanding I return to the present day, which, unfortunately, includes building a website for Stu’s Pools.

  I push Milo gently off the keyboard and delete four pages of question marks, toggling back to my e-mail account.

  No, Stu. I’m sorry, but if you’ll recall, our contract gives me three weeks to build the site. It will be ready on June 26, as promised.

  My fingers fly over the keys, my eyes always slower than the words I’m typing. When they finally land on the date, my fingers freeze and my breath catches.

  June 26.

  June 26. Jem’s birthday. Jem’s thirtieth birthday.

  The sudden lump in my throat is so big and so painful, it almost feels like choking, so I reach up and massage it, pushing my rolling chair away from the desk, away from the date, away . . . away . . . away . . .

  “Would. Have. Been,” I say aloud, the words more bitter than my coffee.

  Would have been . . . would have been . . . would have been Jem’s thirtieth birthday, I force myself to acknowledge.

  My therapist, Anna, told me it was like this when you lost a loved one in a violent or unexpected death: for years—or sometimes, in extreme cases, for the rest of your life—you might still keep track of the important days and milestones. It was because you never got to say goodbye or prepare yourself to say goodbye. Even if you are someday able to make peace with their passing, part of you may not be convinced that the loved one is actually gone. Some secret, hidden, yearning part of you might stubbornly hold on to the unconscious, irrational belief that they aren’t actually gone at all, just missing, just away. And when your brain forces you to realize that they are, in fact,

  Dead

  . . . for a moment—for that moment—you will lose them all over again.

  It doesn’t happen to me as often now as it did in the first year . . . but it still happens occasionally, and it knocks me on my ass every time.

  “Lean into it,” advised Anna. “Take a few minutes to remember Jem—what he meant to you, how much you loved him. And then take the time to say goodbye again. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, Brynn. Ignoring it will only keep you from healing. Leaning into it may help your mind, eventually, accept that he’s really gone.”

  With burning eyes, I stand up from the desk chair and leave my office, listening to my slippers scuffle against the hardwood floor of the hallway as I walk past the bathroom and hall closet. Entering the bedroom I shared with Jem, I head for the walk-in closet and step inside, reaching for the shoe box on the top shelf.

  Anna was also the person who helped me come to terms with donating Jem’s clothes to Goodwill and sending his books and albums back to Maine for his parents to keep. I’d sent his beloved backpacking equipment, maps, and guidebooks to his twin sister, Hope, who was also a hiker. I’d kept for myself only what could fit in a small box: a matchbook from the bar where we’d met; letters and postcards we’d written to each other during the two years we were together; pictures from the various hikes we’d taken, mostly in Yosemite; my engagement ring, which I’d stopped wearing on the first anniversary of his death; and his cell phone.

  His cell phone.

  It lay, as it had for almost two years, in a Ziploc evidence bag, uncharged, on the bottom of the box, his dried blood still caked in the crevice between the screen and the plastic body. It had been found several inches from his hand, under the hip of a Stanford undergrad who’d been at the concert with her sister.

  Milo wanders into the bedroom, his face inquisitive and vaguely accusatory, as I sit down on the bed and open the box.

  “Anna said to,” I tell him, wiping a tear from my cheek.

  “Meow,” he answers, winding around my legs before lying down in a patch of sunlight on the carpet and giving me permission to grieve.

  My eyes settle first on the matchbook, a shiny, fire engine red with “Down Time” emblazoned across the top in silver. Pushing it aside, I find a picture of Jem and me—a selfie taken at the Vernal Fall Footbridge in Yosemite. Wincing, I lift the pile of pictures and letters gingerly from the box and set them gently on my bed. Generally, I go through the photos at this point, crying as I remember good times, then tearfully replacing them and whispering, “Goodbye, Jem” as I recover the box and put it back in my closet.

  But today, for whatever reason, I turn away from the photos and look back in the box at the two items remaining: my ring and his phone.

  Impulsively, I reach for the phone and pull it from the box. Unsealing the evidence bag for the first time since it was given to me a year ago, I do something that makes my heart race so rapidly, my head feels light: I lean over my bed and plug Jem’s phone into the charger on my bedside table. Aft
er two years, it springs to life within seconds, the outline of a battery taking shape on the black screen.

  And though the speed and ease with which I am able to bring it back from the dead strikes me as almost obscene, my tears have receded, and I bite my lower lip as a rare feeling of anticipation washes over me. I have no idea what I’m hoping to find on Jem’s phone, but it’s been so long since it felt like something mattered to me, I lean into the feeling of excitement just a little.

  Two years ago, before the Steeple 10 shooting, I had lived a full and rich life. Engaged to Jem and planning our wedding, I got together with my parents in Scottsdale regularly and went out with friends all the time. Soon after meeting Jem, I finished my course of study in website design and started picking up jobs right away. It wasn’t long before I quit working at Down Time and spent most days working from home. I liked being on my own. Even though I was alone, I never felt lonely or isolated.

  Two years later, however, that same job had become an easy way for me to separate myself from the world.

  I rarely leave my house, have my groceries delivered, and exercise on a treadmill in my bedroom. My trips to Scottsdale are infrequent, despite my mother’s worried invitations to visit more often. Long ago, the friends that predated Jem grew tired of my ignoring texts and voice mails. They eventually stopped reaching out, finally telling me that when I was ready to hang out again, I should let them know.

  I am a hermit, except for my twice-monthly visits to Anna. And while part of me knows it isn’t healthy, more of me doesn’t care.

  Beep.

  I look over to see Jem’s iPhone light up, an old picture of us filling the small screen, and a polite demand for his passcode.

  With trembling fingers, I key in 062687, and the screen changes immediately, his apps lining up in five neat rows.

  Calendar. Clock. Weather. Messages.

  Voice Memos. Contacts. Safari. Mail.

  Maps. Settings. Notes. Camera.