The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher Read Free Book Online Page A

window in the door while Iwas swimming in my work, without any sense of self-consciousness. I lost track of time sometimes then, too, but Henry said I did it in a graceful way, “a thing of beauty.” I was afraid to work like that now, afraid to look up at the empty pane of glass.
    It was hard to say what this lost toast meant, exactly. Regardless, my mother knew that I was still a mess, that I hadn’t really even begun to recover from Henry’s death. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure that she had fully recovered, either. She loved Henry, deeply. She called him her boy. Daniel was too close in age with her and so clearly a man when she met him. But Henry was her boy. She once whispered to me, “I couldn’t have saved him.” “Of course not,” I’d said. We all shared the mostly unspoken language of guilt. My family and his, too—we passed it among ourselves with quiet absolutions.
There was nothing we could have done. It was an accident, a fluke. We couldn’t have stopped it
.
    And so, with no reference to Henry except this very associative one—my lost toast wouldn’t have been lost if Henry were here—my mother reached out and held my hand and said, “I miss him, but he’s here. He really is here with us.”
    My sister looked at me and then away, as if to give me privacy. I wondered what kind of expression of grief I was wearing.
    A toast, I thought. I should give my sister a toast—a real toast. The only thought that came to me was this:
Don’t die on each other
. Was that what I’d scribbled down on the note I’d lost? I took a step forward and said, “You have beautifulteeth and you give wonderful presents. And Abbot and I love you.”
    Elysius tilted her head, her eyes glassy. She walked over to me and cupped my face in her hands. “My sweet sister. My Heidi. That was a bullshit toast,” she said, “but it almost made me cry.”
    walked down the long hall past one beautiful bedroom and then another beautiful bedroom. But I stopped before I got to Charlotte’s door and leaned against the wall for a moment, just to feel something stable hold me up.
Nix
? I thought. I shook my head.
    I knocked on Charlotte’s door.
    There was no answer.
    I knocked again, slowly pushing the door open.
    There, sitting on the floor, surrounded by books and notebooks, was Charlotte, staring at a window across the room, bopping her head to music coming through earbuds wired to her iPod. I realized that Charlotte had often had that distant look, like someone spellbound by something no one else could see, even when she was little. She was wearing a ruffled dress that puffed around her like a cupcake with overly ornate icing.
    Her bedroom was not really hers. It was obviously one of Elysius’s creations. There were no posters, no funky chairs, or wild bedspreads. The walls were mauve. There were oil paintingson the walls—real art, probably costly real art—and built-in bookcases, on which was a shelf entirely devoted to classic, probably first-edition, Nancy Drew novels. Elysius had loved them as a kid. Charlotte likely had no use for them whatsoever. All that cardigan-wearing pluck? No, Charlotte would have none of that.
    “Charlotte!” I shouted.
    She lifted her head and gave the wires of her earbuds a tug. They fell to her lap, the music sounding tinny. Her hair was, in fact, blue with black tips, cut short and a little spiky with a fringe of bangs across her forehead. Charlotte was startlingly beautiful. Beneath the blue, black-tipped hair, the nose ring, and the eyeliner, she was a stunning girl. Her posture was awful, but every once in a while she’d tilt her head, or reach for something, and there was a hidden but undeniable gracefulness. Her eyes were a gray blue like her father’s. But she didn’t have his thin frame. She was a bit boxier. In fact, the baggy clothes she usually wore—the black concert T-shirts and camo pants with tons of pockets—made me think that she might be a little self-conscious