What Might Have Been Read Online Free PDF

she’d done more times than she could count.
    He could see the gentle rise and fall of her chest on a sigh as she stared at the dark patch of star-studded sky. After a few moments, she slipped her hand into her pocket and left the fruit there. It was a round bulge at the outside of her thigh.
    She walked through to the west of the property. It took him a few minutes to realize what her destination was. He was shocked when he finally did.
    The family graveyard lay this way, about halfway back.
    In typical fashion, the small square of land was surrounded by a low-slung, black wrought-iron fence. Therewas a small gate, big enough only for one person to pass through at a time.
    The space was beginning to get crowded; he could see the march of headstones, worn and moss-covered in the back and new and shiny in the front.
    His family history. He should probably feel something, standing on the edges of so much history. He didn’t. Or rather, he did for his brother, whose stone would be one of the newest. He’d never actually seen it, though, as he’d left before it was placed. He didn’t feel anything—not curiosity, connection or obligation—for the ones further back. For the people he’d never known.
    Even his parents, who’d died when he and Logan were three, were distant memories of people who’d hardly shaped his life.
    Perhaps in a few days, when Pops disappeared into the ground, he’d feel more.
    At the moment, what interested him was Ainsley.
    Instead of going inside as he’d expected—to visit Logan, he supposed—she stopped to the far right of the fence. Leaning her back against a tree, she let it take her weight, her body almost bowing over itself.
    He wondered what she was doing here, staring out across the lonely space, until the clouds shifted across the moon and a shaft of light filtered down over her face.
    Then he realized she was crying.
    Silent and alone.
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    S HE HADN’T MEANT TO COME HERE . It had been the last place she’d wanted to visit tonight—her emotions,jumbled up and complicated as they were, too close to the surface. But she’d been drawn here, almost against her will.
    Maybe it was Luke. It was inevitable that she’d think of Alexander with him so close. And Logan, of course.
    Her son and husband were both buried inside the fence in front of her. She couldn’t seem to make herself enter. Not tonight.
    It had taken her months to visit the first time. Months for her to forgive herself, God, Luke and the world for what had happened to her son. Months for her to realize tragedy happened.
    Seeing Luke brought some of it back.
    What she had missed, what she had needed, in those first few lonely days had been someone to hold her and tell her it would be all right. It might have been a lie but that hadn’t mattered.
    But no one had been here. It had taken her a while to finally work up the strength to tell herself what she’d needed to hear. She’d found an inner strength she hadn’t known she possessed.
    However, when the nightmares came as they had tonight, the visions of the crash and the hazy memories of sharp, searing pain and loss, sometimes she still wanted someone to hold her and tell her it would be okay. She wanted what she’d had with Luke before it had all gone so wrong.
    She was finally ready to move on, to find that kind of kinship and connection with another human being. To share her soul and her life with someone else.
    In a few weeks she’d be able to do just that. To put the past behind her and move forward.
    Maybe that’s what her nightmares and the tears tonight were for. A goodbye.
    Inside her pocket, her fingers worried the flesh of the peach that she’d plucked. She’d planned on eating it when she’d first reached up and then at the last minute couldn’t do it. Memories of picking fruit from these same trees with Luke, of him licking the juice from her chin, lips