Chapter 33
Rowan stayed late at the office the next night too. He’d happily said good night to the staff, promised he would lock up, and took a deep breath as the old Victorian house settled into its bones. He appreciated the silence of being the last one here.
Though his family hadn’t given him the full third degree at the late meal the night before, there had been no end to the subtle looks and not so subtle ribbing.
His mother warning him away from Annelise for the first time had startled him enough that he hadn’t quite responded the way he should. He should have said more, told her no, at least asked why? Or maybe just why now?
With his father gone, he’d moved back in and basically become the man of the house, though he hated that term.
He was simply the oldest child and the one who was at home the most, or at least the most regularly.
He could not claim the most time spent here—that definitely rotated between Indie and Ford.
These past couple nights, he simply hadn’t showed up.
He’d stayed extra hours and not told anybody when to expect him.
Alder’s hospital schedule was so erratic that no one expected him to be in charge of meals or bills or anything like that.
Mostly he vacuumed the floors and trimmed the hedges for their mom.
Ford—well, Ford was Ford. Being one of the younger siblings, he’d lived a life where things were taken care of for him.
He didn’t remember the hardships of being young, with all of them in that tiny house.
Their family had more as he’d aged, and he hadn’t had to earn money for his football uniform or pay for his own field trips.
Rowan, and Alder, and probably even Heath remembered that well.
Rowan had nearly been legally an adult when the first flood had come.
Ford had been in elementary school, so he probably had some memories of the disaster itself, but he hadn’t really been part of the effort to clean up afterwards.
He sure hadn’t handled paying any of the bills the way Rowan had—at least in the organizing, filing for assistance, and more.
No, Rowan would always think of his younger brother as happy-go-lucky, and to a certain extent, he warred between the idea of wishing Ford would grow up and wanting him to have the chance to stay that way.
It was a little ridiculous to think of Ford as not grown up.
He’d gone to college in Colorado, Veterinary School in Tennessee and now had stable work, though he served shifts between two veterinary practices.
But that was Ford. He wanted to work at the local clinic which was only open two days a week, so he supplemented another two days in Richmond.
Ford was a grown-up, Rowan had to admit. But while his little brother earned enough money to get his own place, he spent a good portion of it on wildlife rescue and helping out the neighbors when they couldn’t afford veterinary care. It was difficult for Rowan to fault his younger brother.
He paused, frozen at his desk as, for the first time, it occurred to him the parallels between Story and Ford.
Both wanted the best for their communities to the point where they often didn’t look out for themselves.
It wasn’t the kind of selfless sacrifice or martyrdom one might expect, but the inability to see what was immediately necessary because of their larger vision of the world.
It could get exceedingly irritating for those directly in their orbit.
For Annelise, it had not been a younger brother whose drive and charity offered few consequences, but the maternal figure who was the only family Annelise had left.
For fifteen years, Rowan had mostly ignored thoughts of Annelise—what she had been through, what it might be like with her family shattering the way it had.
He’d suffered the occasional dream about her.
The blazing hot ones left him awake, twisted in his sheets and still hard and unrelieved.
The soft ones had been so normal they could have been.
Those were even more difficult to leave behind when he woke, but he’d done it.
He’d ignored the implications, told himself they were remnants of another life resurfacing occasionally, but nothing real.
Now that he’d seen her again, he knew those thoughts were wrong.
The dreams were real. All of them—they had to be.
He told himself this, even though he didn’t know, even in the dreams, how many children they had or how long they had been married.
He only knew that those things existed in the dream world.
Now, he wasn’t thinking of them as dreams or wishes but as a credible future world.
His new goal was to make that future happen, though something still stood between them.
Annelise must have lifted the spell she’d cast to keep them apart all those years.
Because now he was able to contact her and find her when he wanted.
In the early days, his phone calls simply hadn’t connected.
When he’d looked for her in all the usual places she wasn’t ever there.
Of course, he’d gone to knock on her door, to demand answers, yet somehow he consistently walked right past the house without stopping.
Then he would ask himself why had he done that?
How stupid was it to go to her house and then just keep walking right by? It had taken a good handful of tries before he realized there was magic in the house that rebuffed him. Not only did she not want him, she wanted him gone.
But something in his mother’s tone the other night told him there might be a kernel of truth to Annelise’s anger. He hadn’t slept well, despite being back in his own bed. Maybe because the last he’d seen her she’d been storming out the door, and maybe because his mother had hesitated.
When his father died, Rowan already had this position in this law firm, and he had an apartment here in Richmond.
His parents insisted that each child have a room in the house even if they didn’t live there.
Rowan always thought it was their way of making up for it from when they were kids, even if they wouldn’t use it.
It always seemed a waste to him, at least until this last flood, when every room and bed and couch was full with the people of the Hollow fleeing disaster up the mountain.
His father would be proud. In the end, maybe Martin’s health had been failing.
Nothing major, just little things. Now Rowan wondered.
Tonight, instead of looking up Annelise’s family, he looked up his own.
His mother had planned his father’s funeral and taken care of everything.
She’d told them all to continue to go to work or school, despite the fact that they were all surprised by his father’s death and shocked by the loss.
Vienna Velasco had tried to keep everything as normal as possible, and Rowan had let her.
Now he wondered if something was hidden in her flurry of effort. Something more than her shocked grief. Or maybe she hadn’t been as shocked as the rest of them?
First, he checked his own father’s obituary, then almost laughed at himself. He had written it. There would be no surprises there. He needed hospital records. His mother would have access to those, but as Martin’s son, Rowan likely wouldn’t.
But . . .
He paused for a moment. A handful of years earlier, his father had gotten his first kidney stone.
They all knew because Vienna had told Jasper to change what he was cooking, and the household food changed to accommodate Martin’s new diet.
But his mother had been out of town when the stone refused to pass, and his father had been rolled into surgery.
Rowan, as the oldest child and closest family member available at the time, was the one who took the day off to accompany Martin.
It should have been Alder, the medical student, the one who would know what to ask and what to watch for.
Unfortunately, he’d been in medical school and not able to just pop up for something as unconcerning as this was.
Now Rowan was popping up from his seat as he remembered.
If he was right . . . Turning and looking through the office files he thought .
. . he would have it here. He had been granted power of attorney for the surgery.
The legal document was open-ended because of the possibility that his father would need some kind of life-saving intervention or decisions made in the worst-case scenario.
Sure enough, it only took a few moments to remember what he had done.
He opened the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and reached into the back for personal legal information.
Though they looked like thick, sturdy wood, the file cabinets were an illusion of fire-proof materials.
Rowan kept paper copies of anything the family would need here.
One good flood, or any natural disaster, would teach a person that.
Sitting back down, he flipped through the pages. Yes, his signature and his father’s graced the bottom. A quick read told him he had enough legal authority to get his father’s medical records.
Something had poked at the back of his brain all day, and by now it had grown to a firm suspicion.
The way his mother reacted to his question made him believe she was holding something back.
What if Martin actually had a serious diagnosis and neither of the Velascos had told the children?
Not that Rowan—or any of them—was still a child.
Though Indie had just been starting college, there would have been no reason to hold the information back, except that they didn’t want to burden anyone.