Page 120 of Angels Are Falling

Thirty-Six

KAI

Past

I wasn’t supposed to be here.

There was a man and a woman in a cold room a few miles west, who had my face and my last name, waiting for their only son to come and sign the papers that would put them in the ground. Instead, their only son was standing in a public garden, drunk, watching another man’s wife build a snowman with his brothers and sister. I had a dead father and mother and too many missed calls from people who wanted to know about the funeral arrangements. Yet, I was here with her.

That was the kind of son I was—a terrible one.

The garden was ringed by a black iron gate, strung end to end with bulbs that turned the falling snow to gold beneath them. There were at least a hundred people in winter coats, strolling lazily to various street vendors for hot chocolate, bratwurst, and roasted nuts. Everything you’d find at a traditional Christmas market.

I stood outside the iron gate, in the part of the dark the light couldn’t reach, and I drank, and I watched.

The bottle had stopped meaning anything an hour ago. Control was the one virtue I had ever claimed. I was the calmest man in any room. I did not snap. I did not slip. And here I was, slumped against a dirty fence with snow in my collar, because she was on the other side, and I had never once in my life managed to be on the same side of the fence as her.

I found her without trying, like always.

My princess.

She did not know my name, and I had gone ahead and given her a pet name in private. She didn’t even know I was alive. A lifetime ago, I’d stood at the back of a hall and watched a girl in head-to-toe blue ignore my entire speech to text someone she loved, and that had been the end of me, and in all the years between, and the encounters she never remembered, she had not once looked up and seen the man in the dark looking back.

Amelie was on her knees in the snow in a long, tan coat, her scarf coming undone, and her dark hair pulled back with ribbons. Even kneeling, even bundled, even on what I knew for a fact to be the worst week of her life, she was the warmest thing in that whole cold garden.

There were three children with her. They had never touched snow before and had come from California for Amelie’s graduation and to witness an East Coast winter. Instead, they had walked into their parents’ graves. And Amelie was trying with everything in her to distract them from their bleak reality.

The Christmas night market had roped off a snow pit where kids could build snowmen, and Amelie had claimed the best corner. “Okay. Watch me. Watch.” She pressed a fistful of snow between her mittens and showed them. “You start it small. Then you set it down, and you roll, and it just—see? It grabs everything.”

“Mine’s not round,” said one of the twins, also kneeling on the ground and trying to copy Amelie.

“It doesn’t have to be round, August. We’re making a lumpy one. Lumpy is better.”

“Mine’s not getting lumpy, Amelie,” Bella whined, holding up a fistful of shapeless snow.

I chuckled despite myself. Somehow, the kids had charmed me with their priorities. Their parents just passed away, and their biggest concern was the shape of their snow.

If only adults were as easy to distract.

The other boy—Jamie—had given up building and was attempting to eat a fistful of snow. Amelie caught his wrist without so much as looking. The little boy laughed, and the snow came down, and it looked like something out of a life I would have set half the world on fire to live inside.

Her husband, as of a few hours ago, stood apart from it.

He held a cup in his hand that he hadn’t touched, and his face had the fixed pleasantness of a man performing happiness he didn’t feel. Someone drifted over to him—one of Amelie’s friends from college—Sean something. I caught the tail end of their conversation.

“—can’t believe you guys did the courthouse thing today.”

“She’s the only woman I’d ever marry. I didn’t see the point in delaying it.” Stefan’s voice was flat. He watched Amelie and his siblings in the snow.

“I get it. It’s just, you guys are so young.”

“Yeah. But after what happened… We just wanted to be a family.”

Sean seemed somber. “Sorry again about your parents. I can’t imagine what you guys are going through. What are your plans now? Amelie told me about your new gig.”

A short, ugly little laugh. “The photography internship? Yeah. That’s not happening.” Stefan turned the cup in his hands. “My cousin’s hooking me up with an office manager position back home.”

“But she said you were excited about the internship.”