Page 135 of Angels Are Falling

I had known this man for less than a year. I had eaten at his table, bled on his lawn, lost a wife and a war to him, and I had never once heard his real laugh. It was quiet and brief, and it was the worst sound I’d ever heard, because there was no cruelty in it at all. Just genuine, astonished amusement.

“You’re offering me money in exchange for my wife?” He shook his head once. “There isn’t enough money in this world. That was always the difference between us.”

He stepped past me, toward the car idling at the curb.

Desperate, I followed him, throwing everything at him for a sliver of my old life back. “Then share her with me. You can convince her of anything. Let me back in. I don’t even need her to leave you. I’ll adjust. As the third. It won’t cost you a thing. You keep the money. You keep the crown, the magazine, all the businesses in this folder—” The wind took another page, and I let it. “—I’ll sign the whole town back to you. I’d rather have half of her than a hundred percent of this.”

He paused, listening to my pleas. Slowly, he turned to face me. “Now why would I do that?”

My voice trembled. “You once asked me what was better—sharing her or losing her altogether.”

“But you only lost her because you shared her. Why would I do that when I finally got my wish?”

“Your wish.” I repeated the words as if they were foul.

He laughed again. “You were so blinded by your own greed that you forgot to ask me, didn’t you? You forgot to ask me what my wish was.”

I racked my brain. “Your wish was Amelie, right? Then let’s continue the arrangement we’d agreed upon. I’ll behave, I swear.”

“That wasn’t my wish. But now, I finally have it, and nothing will make me give up an inch, not even if it costs my life.” He turned toward the car once more.

Above us, my own paper face stared out over the town I now owned. The lift beeped, descending. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sun kept going down on schedule.

He disappeared inside the car, leaving me to realize that I had all the money in the world, but I was the poorest of them all. Because the only thing I wanted would never be for sale.

“Kai.” I ran up to the car and spoke to him through the window.

He waited.

“What was your wish?”

“My wish was for her to love me. It was the only thing my money could never buy.”

Two Years Later

I wasn’t supposed to be here.

There was a wife in a rented chalet a mile down the mountain who thought I was out on a walk. Along with her was a horde of people who called themselves my closest friends, drinking thirty-year-old scotch on my card, and not one of them, in two years, had called me for a reason that didn’t have a favor folded somewhere inside it. Tonight, they wanted to speak about a new restaurant opportunity. Everyone wanted to speak about this or that. There was a board meeting in Darster that needed my attention, sixty-two businesses that answered to me, a magazine to my name. Yet the Prince of Darster was standing in the tree line at the edge of another man’s property, drunk, watching another man’s wife build a snowman with my brothers and sister.

Two years, and the geography of my life had been reduced to this—the wrong side of the fence. The wrong side of the property line in Vale at Christmas.

Vale, of all places.

Years ago, a girl I loved was invited here without me, because everyone involved knew I couldn’t afford the parking, let alone the cabin. She had turned down the offer without thinking, never wanting to go somewhere I wasn’t invited to as well.

I used to lie awake, promising myself that someday I’d buy that entire town a drink just to watch it choke. Well. I could buy Vale now. I owned pieces of three resorts on this mountain through holding companies I’d never visited. And I was standing outside it in the dark all the same, because the thing I’d actually wanted was on the other side of a split-rail fence, wearing a red knit hat, packing snow with both mittens.

I drank, I did drugs, and I watched. It was what I did now. I had gotten unspeakably good at it.

Back in Darster, I had a spot. Past the fence line of my parents’ old house—because Kai decided to make that a permanent home for Amelie, my brothers, and my sister—at the exact place where the kitchen light gave out and the dark began. Somebody had stood there for years before me, learning that window by heart. How ironic that I stood where Kai must have once stood—on the viewing side of the glass—studying the family in my own mother’s kitchen.

They decided to go away for the holiday, and, of course, I followed them like a moth to a flame. I found her without trying. Amelie knelt in the blue evening snow in a long white coat that didn’t close all the way anymore. She was six months pregnant, glowing with visible, undeniable happiness. Kai orbited her like a man guarding a lit candle in the wind. He had cleared the path twice. He had produced a thermos from nowhere. When she reached too far over the snowman’s base, his hand arrived under her elbow before her balance even asked for it, and she laughed at him and swatted him off.

The kids worked around her like a crew that had done this before. And Bella, taller now, stood over the whole operation, directing.

“Remember to start small.” Her voice carried across the snow, happy and bright, and something in my chest went through black ice of its own. “Then roll it.”

Amelie had taught her that, and now Bella was teaching the other kids she was playing with, her friends from boarding school.