Page 52 of Escape to Lighthouse Cove

The questions fell like hammer blows, one after the other, and they kept coming.

“Do you think it’s easier to feel guilt than grief?” Isaiah demanded, his voice rising, his gaze clashing with Noah’s in challenge. “Because as long as you feel guilty, you don’t have to grieve, and grieving is hard, Noah. Grievinghurts.”

“Ihavebeen grieving,” Noah protested, his voice rising too. What did Isaiah think having nightmares most nights, or not being able to sleep, or spending hours staring into space, or feeling like his stomach was lined with lead was? He’d been grieving for a year and a half, and it felt like there was no end in sight.

“No, you haven’t,” Isaiah replied succinctly. “You’ve been feeling guilty, and tryingnotto feel grief, which is why it spills out in inconvenient moments—like when you’re sleeping.”

Noah felt himself flush. “How do you?—”

“I’ve heard you, sometimes.” Isaiah gentled his voice. “I love you, Noah. I’ve loved you and Jem like my own sons since you were little. I know there were a lot of years when we didn’t see each other, but that made no difference to me. I’ve loved you both, and I’ve seen how different you were, and I loved Jem for being Jem and you for being you. And it tears me apart inside to think that you’ve convinced yourself that being you is bad. It’s dangerous. Because it isn’t?—”

“Itis,” Noah insisted. He genuinely believed that, he had to believe that. “If I hadn’t been so?—”

“Noah, you got a little full of yourself, all right?” Isaiah cut across him. “You went to New York, and you became a hotshot venture capitalist and after a youth spent in hotel conference rooms around the world, playing chess, it went to your head.” Isaiah’s voice was kind but firm. “I get it,” he told him. “You wouldn’t be the only one who let success go to your head. It’s a mistake, not a moral failure.”

Noah shook his head. It was all he could do; it was too hard to speak.

“If you let go of the guilt, the guilt you never should have felt in the first place, then maybe there will be the space to feel the grief,” Isaiah urged, his voice achingly gentle. “And that won’t be easy. It will behard. But it needs to happen, Noah, because until it does, it’s like you’re frozen in time and space. And you’ll end up hurting people you love, like Grace, without even meaning to.” He paused while Noah simply stared at him miserably, still unable to speak. “And you’ll hurt yourself even more than you already have, and I know, I absolutelyknow, that is not something Jem would have ever wanted.”

Noah stared at him, his eyes watering with the need to blink, but if he’d blinked, the one frail thread that was holding his composure in place would snap, and then what? Then he’d be a torrent of emotion, a waterfall of grief that would rush and rush and never stop.

He was scared of that, but he realized some part of him also welcomed it. He was tired of holding himself in check, and it wasn’t working anyway. These last eighteen months had been nothing more than a way to stop time, stop everything, including feeling, and of course that hadn’t worked.

Isaiah was right.

And yet he still simply sat there, afraid to move. To breathe. To blink.

Because he was afraid of what would happen if he did.

“Noah,” Isaiah said gently, his voice aching with both sorrow and love, and somehow that word—his own name—was enough to crack the door open again, and let that faint stream of light in. It was also enough to make him blink.

And with that single blink the thread snapped, the walls crumbled, and suddenly Noah’s shoulders were shaking, and he was sobbing like he never had before, like he was being turned inside out, his heart and guts and everything inside him heaving. Isaiah came over to the bed and put his arms around him, and Noah leaned into him, crying like a baby, like a little boy.

And hefeltlike a little boy—the little boy who had done life hand in hand with his twin brother, who couldn’t have ever imagined it otherwise. The boy who hadn’t even had tolookat Jem to know what he was thinking. The boy who knew how sensitive and fragile Jem was, and that it was his job, as the older and stronger one, to protect him. The boy who had ignored his brother’s cries for help because he was having too much fun, and he was too tired of being the one who had to be in charge, who had to make sure Jem was okay. The boy who was now more alone than he’d known it was possible to feel, like you weren’t just missing another person, butyourself.

It was the kind of crying he couldn’t stop even if he tried, but he didn’t try. He’d needed this, he realized. All those nightmares, the crying in the dark, the hours staring into space… it had been nothing more than a holding mechanism, a desperate attempt to keep the grief—this—at bay. And the longer it had gone on, the less and less it had worked. More and more grief had welled up, slipped out.

And heneededit to. He needed to get it all out. He needed to feel it, and then to let it go.

Noah didn’t know how long he sobbed in Isaiah’s arms, only that at some point he was able to shakily ease himself back.

“I miss him,” he whispered as he wiped his face. “I miss him so much.”

“I know,” Isaiah replied, one hand on his shoulder. “Noah, I know.”

From somewhere Noah dredged up a watery smile. Astonishingly, he felt better. Just a little, and totally drained at the same time, but still.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and Isaiah smiled back as he squeezed his shoulder.

29

When the knock sounded on the door five days after Grace had walked away from Grayhaven, she knew who it was. She just didn’t know why he was knocking.

She recognized Noah’s firm yet somehow lighthearted knock, but she had no idea what his expression or mood would be when she opened the door. Jacob had raced ahead of her; it seemed he knew, too. He’d been missing his chess lessons these last few days, but despite his silent pleas, Grace had held firm. She didn’t want to pressure Noah, and she really didn’t want to pretend things were normal and act as if that kiss hadn’t tipped her world right over. She didn’t have the strength or the will for that kind of Oscar-worthy acting, and so she stayed away.

But she’d hoped he’d come calling, and now he had. The question was, why?

She opened the door with trepidation, Jacob pressing in front of her.