Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 130275 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130275 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Goose bumps covered my skin when I truly studied the picture. It was almost like Cillian had been beside me, guiding the brush. Like he wanted me to know how it had felt inside his soul, giving me a glimpse of why he’d felt there was no other option. I shuffled in my seat.
I had no idea what happened after we died. But had it been possible for him to show me this? Had he somehow been in this moment with me, urging me to see? To understand. Foolishly, I searched around me for any sign that he was here. Then I shook my head at my stupidity.
What was I even thinking?
Yet the picture stared back at me, like it had an ominous force, a malevolent agenda, trying to swallow me into darkness too. Was Cillian’s presumed depression so numbing that all his light was sucked from him into a nothingness void of despair? Was this kind of bleakness too much to live with and his reasoning for taking his own life simply to stop this level of anguish and darkness?
If it was, how could I ever hate him? How could I ever question why he didn’t want to stay in this world if this was what he lived with every minute of every day?
Had this darkness stolen his voice too? Is that why he didn’t tell me he was suffering? Had it robbed him of his plea for help? Had it given him no other choice but to succumb to its pull?
I tasted salt on my lips and realized it was from the tears that were tumbling from my eyes. I didn’t want to feel this. I didn’t want this picture to be me too. If this darkness had been in Cillian, could bring such a strong hero down, could it be in me too? Panic wrapped around me and almost brought me to my knees.
Leo appeared beside me. “Let’s take a walk, son.” I stood, not wanting to think and just wanting to be led away from here, from that darkness I felt was calling my name.
I felt the group’s stares on my back and knew there would be one set of blue eyes hyperfocused on me. But I let Leo take me to the white sand of the beach. I didn’t even feel the heat from the blazing sun bearing down upon me. Chills kept me frozen, like I was standing in a freezer, unable to escape.
Leo didn’t talk at first. He just sat beside me. Until he said, “It was my father.” I stopped breathing, only starting again when he said, “I was fifteen.” Leo paused, and I heard him take a deep inhale. “I found him.”
I closed my eyes, hearing the gentle flow of the water, trying like hell to use it to calm me down before my heart tried to lurch from my chest.
“For years it consumed me,” Leo said. “So much so that I became lost to darkness too.” He wrapped his arms around his legs. “I was self-destructive. I flunked out of school. Threw any possible future I had away.”
He let that confession hang in the air between us, until I grabbed hold of it, reeled it in, and asked, “What changed?”
“I got sick and tired of it, Cael,” he said, and I heard the honesty in his deep voice. “I’d lost my dad, but that day, I also lost myself. The boy I was died, and the one I became afterward was born.” He smiled, and I frowned. “Then I met my wife.” Savannah’s pretty face automatically came to my mind, and I felt a spark of grace inside of me grow, and a solitary candle flame began to rise, sucking up more oxygen from the well of grief inside of me to give it more strength.
“I wanted to be better for her.” Leo tapped his chest over his heart. “But I needed to be better for myself.” He finally faced me. “So I went back to school and decided that rather than running from my father’s death, I would face it head-on, honor the man that was my entire world by helping those just like him … and those just like me—the grievers.”
“Why did he do it?” I asked, my chest cracking open and feeling like I was bleeding out, marring the golden sand in red.
“I never knew,” Leo said and ran a fistful of sand through his fingers. One by one the grains poured back onto the beach—nature’s hourglass. I stared at those grains of sand. A billion tiny parts making up a whole. “Knowing what I do about depression, I imagine it was that. But I’ve never known.” He faced me again. “And Cael, I’ve had to make peace with that.” Emotion radiated from Leo’s frame, but I could see he embraced it, wore it like a cape rather than a shroud.