Friday Edition, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

and squeezed it. When Sam looked at him, he nodded and smiled slightly. It was the kind of smile she saw often coming from him, easygoing and soft. She felt her own smile starting to form.
    Todd Matthews was a thirty-three-year-old prosecutor. He had been working for the Truman County District Attorney’s Office for three months when he was assigned to assist Robin with a hit-and-run case.
    He was tall, and slender, and handsome in a kind, quiet sort of way. His soft-spoken personality matched hazel eyes gently framed by glasses that were nearly invisible against his face. There was nothing about him that could be called flashy. He wasn’t pushy, or forceful, or obtrusive. He was as sincere, as he was faithful. And Sam knew that Robin had a deep, abiding trust in him.
    Todd leaned over and whispered to Sam. “Where’s Brady? I didn’t see him at the church.”
    She shrugged. “I expected to see him too. I was surprised that he didn’t come with you.”
    “I called to take him, but he said he was going with his father,” Todd said.
    Sam knew Brady Gilmore would not be able to get to the church on his own. But for Robin, she was certain that, despite his limitations, he would attend her funeral. Sam stared at the gaping hole before her that would soon be consumed by Robin’s casket and let her mind linger on Brady Gilmore and the day that changed everything between him and her sister and the relationship they once had.
     
    Robin called in a panic and told Sam to come to the hospital. Her voice was rising and falling with each breath she took that Sam could hardly calm her down. “Which hospital?” Sam asked.
    Robin told her and Sam was there within the hour. She found Robin in the emergency room standing against a wall. Head back. Eyes closed.
    “Robin,” Sam called softly. Robin opened her eyes and looked at Sam and fell heavily into her arms, heaving great sobs. “What happened?” Sam asked.
    “B … Brady,” Robin managed between gasping breaths. “Brady.”
    “What about Brady?” Sam said trying to encourage her sister to continue.
    “He … he dived off the platform into the water but didn’t come up.”
    They both had just graduated high school with honors. Their futures were in front of them, both eager to tackle it. They had been planning the outing with friends at the Boulder Reservoir for weeks. To this day, no one really knows what happened to Brady under the water. Only that he was without oxygen for twenty minutes, maybe more before they could get him to the surface.
    Sam remembered watching Robin those first few weeks after his accident. The days, the long days Brady spent in ICU. Then the rehab, which was painstakingly slow, if some days it came at all. He was so frustrated with his progress that he asked Robin to stop coming.
    “I don’t want her to see me like this anymore,” he told Sam in a halting voice one evening.
    And Robin did stop going to see Brady.
    A quiet afternoon, more than a year after Brady’s accident, Robin and Sam were sitting on their apartment balcony smoking and drinking beer, watching the foothills cloud up with the anticipation of a late spring storm. Thunder rumbled in the distance and they could smell the thick richness of rain coming.
    “Sometimes it seems,” Robin began by saying, “that I’ve gone beyond the sound of his voice, moved past his smile, and forgotten what it feels like to have his hand in mine.”
    Robin cast a sideways glance toward Sam, but she said nothing. Robin went on, “I’ll hear someone utter a phrase, something like he might have said, or when I go to visit him now and he moves his head a certain way or smiles I catch a glimpse of the old Brady. And I’m back with him all over again.” She stopped and added her own smile. “His smile was the first thing I noticed.”
    “Yes,” Sam said. “I know.”
    “He was coming down those steps, holding his tennis racquet and wearing a baseball cap and smiling in my direction. That