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“Luke.” He stopped abruptly and waited for her to catch up. Once she did, she threaded her hand through his stiffly held arm. “Now you’ll have to slow down or drag me along with you.”

She saw his chest rise, heard the rush of breath as he exhaled. “Sorry.”

The cemetery was a wide-open expanse of green, crisscrossed with tree-lined paths. “It feels peaceful here,” she commented.

He glanced at her, then back in the direction they were headed. “I thought that, when I chose it.”

She couldn’t imagine being seventeen and having to choose a place to bury your mom. “Did you have any family to help? Grandparents? Aunts and Uncles? I feel terrible that I don’t know.”

“You were a kid, Anna. Why would you care about some guy your brother was friends with?”

“I care now.”

His expression softened. “Mum was an only child and she wasn’t close to her parents.” He blinked. “I wrote to them, after she died, but never got a reply. I don’t know if they’d moved and not told her, or if . . .”

He trailed off and she silently filled in the rest. If they’d just not bothered to reach out to their grandson.

Finally he came to a stop at a simple grey headstone.

Mary Jane Harris (Mum)

Died January 1st, aged 42 years.

A muscle jumped in his jaw as he laid the flowers against the granite.

“That must have been a hard December for you.” Anna thought about the conversation they’d had about decorating the tree. “No wonder you aren’t a fan of Christmas.” She reached for his hand, found it balled into a fist, and wrapped her fingers around it. “Why haven’t you been back here?”

“Too many fucking memories.” Beneath her hand she felt his fist tighten. “I hate your brother right now, Anna.”

The bleakness in his expression tore at her. “I know, I can see that. I think . . . I think he must have thought you needed to face this.”

* * *

Luke’s stomach churned and acid surged up his throat. Torture did not begin to describe how this felt, standing here, forced to face the woman he’d let down. And with the woman he desperately didn’t want to do the same too, who was right now looking at him with so much compassion, he was mortifyingly close to losing it.

“Your brother didn’t like it when I refused to enter into a conversation about Mum.” He let his anger seep through. It was the easiest of his emotions to handle. “He always told me it wasn’t healthy to hold the feelings back, that I should go to see her, talk about her. But it was okay for him to clam up when it came to something as important as a terminal cancer diagnosis.” He’d bottled this up for so long. Now it threatened to spill over. “I don’t think I can forgive him,” he admitted, his voice raw. “Why not let me be there for him all the way through? I’d gone through it with Mum, dammit, I knew how hard it was for her. Why couldn’t he let me ease his burden?” His voice cracked and he shook off Anna’s grip to dig the heels of his hands into his eyes in a desperate attempt to stop the flow of tears.

Her eyes, too, had a telltale sheen. “You told me he kept it quiet to spare us, and I have to believe that was true. That it gave him comfort in those early months to see us unburdened by the knowledge of his diagnosis.” She wrapped her arm around his waist and for such a soft person, she had one hell of a firm hold. “Plus, because he knew what you’d gone through with your mom, the years of chemo, of knowing how sick she was, he wanted to spare you having to go through a repeat of it.”

“But that’s exactly why I should have known he was sick.” How many times had he laid awake at night over the last few months, going through every single phone call, every catch-up he’d had with Colin. He’d been too self-obsessed, too worried about applying for a job he didn’t even know he wanted anymore, to take notice of his best friend. It was like a repeat of what had happened with his mum, only substitute holiday for job. “When we went hiking in the summer, he couldn’t keep up with me like he usually did.” His eyes stung and bile inched up his throat. “I busted his balls over it, told him he was unfit, for crying out loud.”

“He would have found that funny.” She placed a hand on his cheek, forced him to look into her baby blue eyes. “He would have preferred that to you treading on eggshells around him.”

Her kindness was too much. He couldn’t hold her gaze. “Yeah, I wasn’t cautious around him when I pushed him in those last few months,” he said bitterly.

“It’s what he wanted,” she asserted.

“But was it the right thing to do? You certainly didn’t think so.” He squinted his eyes shut, felt his whole body tremble. “What if I exhausted him so much, he died before he should have done?”

“No.” She gripped his shoulders and actually shook him. “You were wonderful with him. You treated him like he wasn’t sick and that was so important to him, to have that time when he could just be himself, and not a man with terminal cancer.” Tears streamed down her face but her hold on him remained strong, her eyes steady on his. “I realize now that he needed us both, me to be the nurse, to care for him when he was tired, when he felt ill. You to remind him that though he was dying, in those last few weeks we had with him, he was still very much alive.”

He wanted to believe her, believe he’d done the right thing by his best friend, but his track record said otherwise.

Slowly he turned to face his mum’s headstone. His stomach gave a vicious twist as guilt ripped through him. “I let her down.” As he finally said out loud the words he’d locked up tight for fifteen years, his legs gave way and he dropped to his haunches. His hand shook violently as he gripped the headstone, both to feel close to her, and to keep himself from keeling over. “Mum.” His throat felt like he’d swallowed glass. “I’m so sorry.”

Anna arms circled him from behind. He felt the warmth of her body, the strength in her hold, the press of her head against his back. “Why are you sorry, Luke?” she whispered.

Her quiet question was his undoing. He had to tell her what he’d done, so she knew exactly who he was. “I had a trek booked right after Christmas, to Machu Picchu. It was my first one, booked nearly a year before, and I couldn’t fucking wait. The school agreed to it, even though it meant missing the first few days of the semester. I guess they felt sorry for the kid whose mum had cancer.” Emotion balled in his throat and he had to pause, to take a hard swallow. “We didn’t know when we booked it that she’d go downhill so fast by December.” His voice broke and he couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. “She told me to go. Of course she did, because she loved me, wanted me to be happy. But I knew she was weak, that she needed me at home.” He croaked out the words he’d never spoken to anyone, not even Colin. “And I wanted to go to fucking Machu Picchu, so I did. I left her on Boxing Day, even though I knew there was a chance I’d never see her again.” The last words tore out of him. “And I never did.”