Lachlan Kelly (viridi_motus) wrote in theunboundic, @ 2018-06-05 20:39:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! time: february 6 - march 19, lachlan kelly, morrigan kelly |
Where there is love, there is peace
Who: Morrigan & Lachlan
What: The 23rd Anniversary of their mother’s death
Where: Glynn's Graveyard
When: March 13, 1926
Lachlan stood before his mother’s cairn on the anniversary of her sudden passing, and yet he did not know what he was doing there. It had been twenty three years since Brenna Kelly had collapsed and died, but the events of the last couple of months made it feel as if it had happened so much more recently. Being back at the scene of his greatest mistake, being back in Morrigan’s presence… Lachlan scrubbed a hand over his face like one might do right after having woken up, but the action did not rouse him from this waking nightmare he found himself in.
He didn’t know what he was doing in Glynn. His sister, the one he had only maimed and not the one he had killed, had brought him back to this place, to the place they had once called home. Logic would have dictated that gesture was a sign that all had not been lost, that Morrie still thought of him as her brother, even though Lachlan couldn’t fathom how she could possibly feel that way. Evelyn was dead because of him, and her passing was not the sudden one that their mother had. No, his sweet sister’s final moments had been a catalogue of every feeling she did not deserve; confusion, panic, terror and pain.
The waking nightmare came through when the logic that said that Morrie still cared about him flew in the face of reality. She did not, as he knew she could not. The tense, bitterly short exchanges they had shared since his return were proof enough of that, which is why he had stayed away for all these years; why add to Morrie’s misery by being present when she wished him not to be? The other motivation for leaving was far more selfish. Lachlan was not scared about legal repercussions for his actions, if the marshall could somehow prove his guilt when he had taken pains to avoid leaving evidence behind. Prison would have been bearable, but losing another sister was not. Lachlan would have taken a cold, dark cell over fresh air and freedom, if that freedom meant he was shut off from Morrigan’s love.
At least in Castyll, he could focus on the Resistance and not on the aching hole where his family used to be, and Morrie would not need to see the man who was responsible for tearing her family apart.
Yet there he was, back in Glynn and breathing in air warm and sweet with the promise of the coming Canwyn. All around him, new life was unfurling in the place where they buried their dead, but he could not appreciate the beautiful proof of the cycle of life when there was a leaden, aching weight on his chest, right over his heart. Swallowing hard, Lachlan thumbed at the stone in his hand, feeling the roughness of it at his fingertips and not quite knowing how he was going to lay it on his mother’s grave. There were other stones there, ones he had placed with his father, with Morrie, with Evelyn. They had been there for many years and would be there for many more, but it had been a long time since he had added one to his mother’s cairn. Was it even right for him to do so? Had Brenna Kelly been alive at the time of the fire, she would have no doubt rightfully disowned him as a son for what he had done. She wouldn’t have wanted him there, just as Morrie did not want him there. At least he could still do something for his sister, tend to the vineyards that mattered to her so much. But for his mother? What could he possibly ever do there?
******
For many years, Morrigan had visited the graveyard that held so many members of her family alone. Most season of her life were marked by loss, and by adding stones to cairns by herself. Her sister’s during the peak of heat under Heuris. Her father’s at the beginning of Galarrayn. Her mother’s as Canwyn approached. Today was March thirteenth, the anniversary of the day mother fell without warning, stopped existing without saying goodbye. Today, as Morrie approached her cairn with a rough stone in her hand, she saw across the distance a small figure.
Dark hair, dark clothes, dark shapes, dark thoughts. Lachlan. For a long moment, Morrie just stood and stared from a distance. She cut an imposing figure herself, her black dress, black hair, black cane. She had left Calvin’s thoughtful, artful gift in her room in favour of the less comfortable and sharper edged crow’s head cane she had relied upon for years. It was less comfortable, but perhaps that was a small torture she inflicted upon herself in the sadness of the day.
Of all of the losses of her life, this was the one Morrie understood the least. Her sister had died from hatred, from an unfathomably tragic misdirection of Lachlan’s anger. Her father had died of grief, from his own misery turned sourly in on itself. But her mother… their family had been happy until then, in a simple way just because they were together and they were alive in a way Morrigan had taken for granted until it was gone.
Her mother’s death had been utterly senseless, and yet… it did not feel senseless in this moment. No, Morrie felt a strange sort of inevitability in seeing her brother there. This death, their mother, was the only one which did not deepen her bitterness towards him. In fact, Morrie remembered sadly how Lachlan had helped their family through this. When their father had stumbled upon losing his wife, Lachlan had taken care of both of his sisters, had taken care of the winery too though he had been too young to do so at the time. It had been a very painful loss, and one that had begun Morrie’s suspicion towards her faith, but Lachlan had been there. That had made it easier, as it had when Doughal had left her. Lachlan had been on her side then, always, unequivocally.
She hadn’t had that through the other losses of her life, of course, and now that she thought about it, Morrigan realized she’d been wrong. Thinking about this death deepened her bitterness towards Lachlan just as much as all the others. At that realization, Morrie’s heart twisted too painfully in her chest and she had to move. She crossed the graveyard towards him, cane in one hand and stone in the other.
“You owe her a lot of stones, brother,” she called out as she approached. Her voice crackled with pain as it filled the space between them. Her emotions were always closer to the surface amongst the cairns, and her knuckles were white as she clenched her own flat, jagged stone tightly in her right hand.
*****
Morrie's voice did not carry on the breeze so much as it cut right through it. Lachlan turned at the sound of it, feeling as though his somber thoughts had solidified into the very source of his turmoil. Whilst it was true that he was the root cause of the twisted, tragic chapter in his life's story, he had spent the last seven years turning page after page in an attempt to forget it. Morrie was marker that brought him back to the point he wished had never happened, and Lachlan swallowed hard as he tore his gaze from her approach and focussed back on the cairn.
He could have placed his stone and left, but his fingers had reflexively tightened around it to the point he didn't think he was physically able to let it go just yet. Morrie's approach was not a fast one, but the intervening moments between him facing the cairn and her reaching his side were not nearly long enough to prepare Lachlan. He had no idea what he was supposed to say. Asking Morrie what she was doing there was out of the question, given that they were both well aware that it was the anniversary of their mother's passing. In some respects, it was the point from which everything else had started to unravel. Brenna Kelly had been their mother, and the thread that tied their family together. Their father had lost a part of himself when she died, and although Lachlan, Morrie and Evelyn had managed to keep it together for a few years, they had eventually all lost themselves too.
"I can come back later if you wish to be alone here," he offered lowly, knowing Morrigan would not have come to the graveyard with the wish of seeing him. Especially not on this day. He might not have been responsible for their mother's death, but he had been for Evelyn's, and Morrie had no doubt wished to reflect on better times when they had both been alive, happy and well.
*****
Morrie almost let him leave. All it would take was a nod. She wouldn’t even have to say a word, and he’d walk away and leave her alone again. He made it so easy, because he clearly didn’t want to engage with her, and likely least of all here, today.
Oh, how tempting it was to let him, but her temper, which was so stretched taut, just couldn’t allow it. Instead, Morrie took a breath that seemed to lance through her even if there was no Galarrayn chill in the air, and she spat, “Running is still your first instinct.”
She wanted to look away, but she didn’t. She made herself watch, her jaw clenched tight, as was the rest of her, one hand on a rock, the other on her cane handle. She wanted to see him react to her sharp words. After all, he hurt her a little more every time he put more space between them, and she wanted to hurt him in return.
“Always lean into the wind, she used to say. How completely you’ve forgotten.”
It was a phrase of their mother’s, a creative way to tell them to be brave. Their mother was who had inspired Morrigan’s love of poetry. Even though Morrie had only been eight when she died, she remembered fondly how much her mother had loved words, how often she had read to them, and so to throw some of those words back at Lachlan now for his cowardice seemed appropriate.
*****
Morrie held a weapon in each hand, the very embodiment of sticks and stones, but it was her words that would hurt the most. Lachlan was already standing as still as a statue among the cairns, but when Morrie spat at him like that he ceased all moment, his chest not even rising to draw in another breath.
It only lasted a moment, but it felt like an eternity before Lachlan could bring himself to look at her once more. “There is the wind, Morrigan, and then there is a gale.” Should he lean into that, into the full force of her bitter anger, they would both be blown away by it. This wasn’t a matter of being brave, Lachlan would have been brave if he believed there was something left to be saved. But what was there to be achieved by inflicting himself upon another who had no desire to be around him, and who deserved whatever shred of peace he could offer in his absence?
“What would you have had me do instead? You told me to leave you to your work, and would have done so again if I had tried to ask you to come here with me on this day.” After all, Morrie had done just that, cut him down and cut him off before he had a chance to give her a birthday gift. The sting of that still lingered in his heart, long after the stab of pain from the rose’s thorns had faded from his palm. To suffer the same again, only worse, would have been madness when there seemed no hope that it could have gone any other way.
******
At his question, she felt her chest tighten. What would she have him do instead? How about try, instead of assuming there was no use. She had come all the way to Castyll for him, spent most of her meagre savings to travel there to find him. Was he waiting for a formal invitation?
Though she felt her anger bubble up, she tried to keep it at bay, tried to remind herself what Caden had said. Lachlan was here now, and Morrie just had to live with it. Just as she had to live with her injuries and her loses. But she couldn’t keep the anger at bay when he was standing right there, looking right at her, and implying there was nothing else he could have done. Was she supposed to pretend she wasn’t hurt? Was she supposed to forgive him before he even asked? How could he expect so much of her and not even be willing to try?
She had been trying so hard to keep her anger in check and treat him with distance and professionalism, because that was the only way she knew how to protect herself, but over the weeks he had been here, it had chipped at her heart. Now, at their mother’s grave site, she couldn’t do it anymore.
“You left me,” she hissed, her voice shaking. “How dare you expect me to -- to be the one to ask you --”
Anger overcame her then, and she couldn’t handle it, as though giving voice to a small part of her anger had built momentum in the rest of it. She couldn’t keep it contained. Instead, she leaned towards him with the gale force of her anger and shouted into the quiet of the cemetary, “You left me! I was alone!”
******
Of course he had left. How could he have stayed? Their home had been destroyed, their family had been destroyed. Lachlan used to be tied to Glynn, rooted as deep into its earth as the vines his family tended to, but the fire had scorched that earth both literally and figuratively.
But Morrie's shouted words were not a statement of fact, they were an accusation.
Her fury rang out in the quiet of the cemetery, so loud and harsh that it silenced the birds that had been chirping in a nearby tree. Lachlan did not flee from the force of her anger, even though it threatened to cut down everything in its path. They had always been the the more extreme siblings, all hot as Heuris and cold as Galarrayn when Evelyn was the more temperate Canwyn between them. Now there was no balance, no order to how things were meant to be, and their conversations were chaos.
Nothing about it made sense, and Lachlan’s brows drew together as he shook his head, unable to process how Morrie had twisted up his words. “I didn’t -- I wasn’t expecting you to --” Frustrated at his inability to reply with a coherent sentence, Lachlan flung his free hand up into the air as if he was giving up. “I would have asked you to come here, had you not made it resoundingly clear that you had no time for me the last time I tried to rebuild any kind of connection!”
Lachlan had very literally burned his bridges and had known better than to try to repair the charred remains. For seven years he had not tried, then Morrigan had come back into his life. Against his better judgement, he had made tentative steps to trying to repair their bond, only to be immediately rebuffed. Morrie did not want him back, which was no surprise, but why then was she standing there on the other side of that burned bridge, shouting at him for it instead of turning around and walking away?
******
“No!” Morrie snapped, before he even fully finished. “Enough excuses! I don’t want to hear what you would have done. You did nothing. You did nothing before you left, you did nothing while I was healing, you did nothing when father died, you did nothing when I lost the vineyard… Even when I came all the way to Castyll to bring you back, you have still done nothing!”
The damn had fully burst now, and while Morrie knew she had been avoiding Lachlan since he’d been back, it wasn’t really him she’d been trying to keep at an arm’s length. It was this, all this pain, all this anger, all this bitterness that she had been burying for years, this was what she had been avoiding. It was all this hurt that she didn’t trust him not to make worse, and still didn’t, yet she couldn’t avoid it anymore.
“You should have been here. You have no idea what it was like,” she said in a quieter voice, a lower, hollower, more mournful one, though it still shook with barely contained fury. “Do you want to? Do you want to know what you left me to deal with on my own? What you have been avoiding all these years? Do you want to know the burden I had to carry because you were too… proud or afraid or… heartless to help me carry it?”
******
It had been better for all that he exile himself, than to remain behind and force Morrie to face him when there was no conceivable way that she would want to. “Help you carry it?!” Lachlan’s own anger flared then. Not at Morrie, never at her, but from the sheer overwhelming confusion that took over him. They were standing there amongst the cairns, in a place of peace and calm that was, in that moment, anything but. “What could I have possibly carried, when I would have been shut out then as I am now?”
******
He was so determined that she was shutting him out, and yet every part of Morrie was pleading for him to try. She had all but begged him. She had come to get him, she had gotten him a job, she had kept him close, and even now, she stood before him and heard all of his reasons that she wasn’t worth trying, or that it was her fault he wasn’t. It would have hurt far less to leave, but she was still there.
“You could have at least tried!” she said, lifting her cane a few inches and slamming it back down on the ground to punctuate the last word.
But then a strange sort of calm came over her, and she almost felt as though she were a witness to this moment, instead of a participant, when the next words began pouring out of her. It wasn’t fair that he didn’t know, that he had been able to avoid it, and it certainly wasn’t fair for him to keep telling himself that he could not have done anything to make it easier on her.
“I could -- I could smell the burnt skin, you know. For ages,” Morrie started, her eyes sliding from his face over to their mothers cairn behind him. “I had to try and lay still while Krishna peeled the dead parts of me away from whatever was left, and I knew that I would never be the same again.”
But that wasn’t all. There was so much more.
“He also had to clean me, bathe me, feed me. All of it hurt so much that I screamed until I lost my voice. Even then, I whispered my darkest thoughts at him, and still, he persisted in caring for me no matter how hard I tried to shut him out.”
Those words, an echo of his, an accusation that Lachlan should have tried, even if he expected to be shut out. He should have kept trying, even if he had been rebuffed, because didn’t she deserve that? Didn’t she deserve her brother’s love even though she was at her lowest, and could feel nothing but suffocating agony all around her?
“All the while, father was drinking himself to death, and I couldn’t do anything about it from bed. I just had to lay there and watch. For weeks, I spent my days watching my father die while my burned body tried and failed to knit itself back together again. Can you even imagine what it was like for me, Lachlan?”
There was the briefest of pauses as she flicked her eyes, finally, back up to Lachlan’s, staring into his as she dealt the final, most intimate blow.
“Is it any wonder that I asked Krishna to let me die? That I begged him? Wouldn’t you have?”
******
The ground upon which Morrie slammed down her cane was solid, but the move only resulted in a muffled thump as it struck the grass. That was of no matter, the whipcrack of Morrie's voice was more than powerful enough to make up for the shortfall in the emphatic gesture.
Lachlan's gut churned at the mention of burned skin. He knew the scent of it well, it had taken a hold in his memory just as Evelyn's screams had, replayed time and time again in his nightmares. The night of the fire had started off like a dream. They were in the midsts of Heuris, and the air had been calm and still warm from the heat of the day that had passed. Fuelled as he was by anger and defiance, Lachlan had drained the life from Hiraeth’s vines with the same level of ease with which he had nurtured them. Bright flames had hungrily devoured the withered remains, licking along the barren, twisted branches that only moments before had been lush with vivid green leaves and heavy with grapes that would soon be ready for harvest. Then a breeze had picked up, and glowing embers were whipped up into the air where they hung in the inky darkness of the night sky like fireflies. There had been a terrible kind of destructive beauty in that moment, before the wind had really taken hold of the blaze, then it had all gone so terribly, terribly wrong.
Right as Morrie spoke of having lost her voice from the screaming, Lachlan opened his mouth to beg her to stop. But nothing came out, he was as mute as she had been as a fist of emotions closed tight around his throat.
Morrie did not appear to notice. In fact, she seemed to be outside of herself as she relayed the arduous journey she had been forced to undertake after the fire. Would there be any other way to speak of such things without falling to pieces? Physical distance had been the only way for Lachlan to bear what had happened, and Morrie did not have that luxury.
War had shown Lachlan how horrific life could be. It was one thing to objectively know how dark a path might be, but it was a different thing entirely to walk headlong down that path and be enveloped by that darkness. He had seen more and done more than most, but nothing prepared him for Morrie's words. They might have just been that, words, but they struck Lachlan right in the heart far harder than a Clove could ever hope to. No, he could not imagine what it had been like for her, but could not say as much. That knot of emotions had twisted in his throat to the point he nearly choked on it, dislodged only when Morrie met his gaze and said she had asked Krishna to let her die. Not only that, she had begged him for it.
He had killed one sister, and made another wish for death. As their brother, he should have taken care of them, but had done the complete opposite. There was no forgiving that. And yet... "Sister, I am so sorry. The remorse will be with me until the end of my days. It should have been me in your place, you did not deserve this."
******
Sister, I am so sorry. You did not deserve this.
How long Morrigan had waited to hear those words from him, how long had she yearned to be absolved for the guilt she had carried over her Gift not being strong enough to save Evelyn from the fire, over not being able to save their father from himself, over losing their family legacy on the vineyard… It was not her fault. It was Lachlan’s fault, or fate’s fault, but whoever’s fault it was, she did not deserve it.
She was so full of anger and pain that she was so tempted to agree with Lachlan, that it should have been him in her place, that it should even have been him in Evelyn’s place. But even with all of her fury, standing there in front of her last surviving family member, she could not bring herself to truly direct all of her bitterness and loss at Lachlan, either. He had not meant to. He could never have meant to, and he was so sorry. She could hear it in his voice, pain that was so deep it echoed, and she recognized it because she was familiar with it.
So Morrie could not blame him entirely, but how could she forgive him entirely, either? Was that not unfair to Evelyn? It tore at her, that desire to have her brother back, that wish to no longer be alone, the last Kelly barely standing in Glynn. Could she forgive him just because she wanted him back, and betray her sister’s memory that way?
Morrie knew she had been quiet too long, staring at him with their history written on her face, and she took a shaking breath. “No, I did not deserve this. And if it had been you in my place, I would never have left you to deal with it alone. Even if the marshall came for me.”
Her voice shook on those last words, and she felt her eyes fill with tears. Unwilling to keep eye contact as she shed them, she stepped past him, careful not to touch him in the process, and then stopped at her mother’s cairn. The Fade made her Gift unreliable, but so too was her body, especially when it came to crouching. Still, she was upset, and she would prefer to risk physical injury than knocking over her mother’s cairn, so she gripped her cane fiercely as she leaned down to place the stone on the pile with shaking hands.
It stayed, and though she winced and had to grab her cane with both hands to haul herself back up to her feet, she managed without assistance. Once that task was done, she could feel Lachlan behind her again, could feel all the tension in the air between them. Now that she wasn’t looking at him, now that she was facing their mother’s grave, she couldn’t help but feel moved by the knowledge that their mother would be heartbroken to know they were estranged.
With that in mind, her voice was low as she whispered, “But you did leave, and I… I have missed you every day that you’ve been gone.”
It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was something.
******
No matter how long Morrie stood there in silence, it would never measure up to the seven years of silence Lachlan had imposed on them both. When she did break it, there was the force of their whole history behind each and every syllable, and it struck him to his core. “You think I left because of the marshall?” he asked, his voice cracking under the weight of his emotions. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Lachlan did not fear punishment for his actions, even though he valued the limited freedom he still had left under Faidoux. “I could face prison, life surrounded by nothing but concrete and iron bars, but I could not face you turning away from me.”
And he still could not understand how Morrigan could have done anything else but turn her back on him. There was no forgiving an unforgivable act, and the absence of ill intent behind his misdeed meant nothing. If anything, Evelyn’s accidental death and Morrie’s grievous injury were all the more tragic because they never should have happened in the first place. The blame lay entirely at Lachlan’s feet, regardless of the fact that he had not meant for any of it to happen. How could Morrie face him? He was the man responsible for her sister’s death, their father’s death, and he had given up the privilege of being called her brother.
As Morrie moved past, Lachlan yearned to reach out to her but kept his hands firmly clenched at his sides; one around the stone meant for the cairn, and the other with its nails digging into his palm. He had no right, no right at all, to try and offer her comfort when he so selfishly wanted some of his own too. Nor was it his place to give support that was not asked for or wanted, when Morrie was clearly capable of managing on her own. She’d had no choice but to do so for years.
There was so much control in her struggle, as she bent and placed her stone on their mother’s cairn. Her whispered words could have easily been missed by anyone else, but Lachlan caught every one. Needing a moment to collect himself, Lachlan moved past Morrie to place his stone down beside hers. He straightened up slowly, before turning to face her. Morrie missed him. She did not forgive him, but she missed him. That was more than he could have ever hoped for. “And in all my days and nights, there has never once been a time where I have not thought of you.”
******
So it was not fear of the consequences that had kept him away, then, but fear of her judgment. Perhaps in that way, their estrangement was partially her fault. She had always been someone who went to extremes, so she should have known he would think her incapable of forgiveness. And mayne she was, but… she still wanted her brother back. She couldn't help it. She couldn't really take the blame for him being gone so long, but she could have gathered her courage and reached out sooner.
Perhaps if she had, they would have been here, standing side by side in front of their mother, many years ago. Morrie could feel him next to her, at her right side. Her good side, the side without the cane between them. He was facing her, perhaps, but she could not look at him. She could reach out now, though, and with her eyes firmly fixed on the monument of stones to their mother's memory, she extended her hand to him. Her scarred palm faced up, open. It was such a simple movement, such a slight gesture, but at the same time, it felt like everything. It was a physical admission that she wanted comfort, and that she wanted it from him. If he had thought about her every day, and she him, then perhaps they needed each other.
“Lachlan,” she whispered in a rough tone, those tears still wetting her cheeks Morrie still couldn't look at him, and she wasn't good at asking for anything. She could tell people what to do, but she was no good at asking for what she needed. She just didn't have the words for more than his name right now. She just had to hope he would give her what she was so fearfully hoping for. Comfort, affection of some sort, a sign that he meant it and would be there for her now, maybe even a hug. If he didn't indulge her with something in this moment, Morrie wasn't sure she would recover from that. She certainly wouldn't reach out again.
******
Morrie was holding out her hand to him, presenting more to Lachlan than he had ever hoped to have again. He didn’t see a scarred palm, all he saw was her. His beloved sister, the one he thought had been as lost to him as Evelyn.
Lachlan took her hand, encircling it in his much larger one, but could not stop there.
Holding her hand in his, Lachlan stepped forward to hug Morrie, trapping their clasped hands between them as his free hand slid around her waist and pulled her close. He screwed his eyes shut, pressing his face into Morrie’s dark curls, and held her tightly, never wanting to let her go again.
******
The moment Lachlan’s hand clasped around hers, Morrigan let out a shuddering breath. When he pulled her close, the feeling of his arm around her, his warm body against her… She really had missed her brother, and as Morrie squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in, she recognized his scent and the familiarity that washed over her was something she had thought she might never feel again.
Her free hand came up to wrap around him, and she buried her face against the juncture of his shoulder and neck as she felt the very complicated grief bubble out of her. Her tears wet his coat as she held tight to her brother, but she didn’t let go. She still had many mixed feelings, things weren’t resolved between them, but there was one thing that was certain, one thing that she would make sure of. They were going to be family again.
“I was fine on my own, but if you ever abandon me again…” Morrie started, but she couldn’t finish the threat because really, what could she do? She hoped the threat wasn't necessary anyway.
******
The enormity of the painful history between them could not be wiped clean with one hug, but it was a start. Lachlan still felt the bone-deep ache of guilt, he did not think that regret would ever go away. Nor did he want it to, it was the price he had to pay for what he had done. But around that regret and guilt was a loneliness he had never fully acknowledged, that eased its grip around his heart as Morrie held him tight.
There was still a complicated tangle of issues that they would need to work through, and Lachlan was under no illusion that the path they were set to walk down would be smooth and trouble free. But they had taken the first step, they both wanted to resolve things, and could support each other through the process just as they supported each other in that moment with the hug.
As Morrie’s threat trailed off into silence, Lachlan pressed a kiss into her hair and squeezed her hand as if to emphasise that he was not about to let her go. “I will never leave you again, Sister. I promise you that.”
******
He promised. The question was, did his word mean anything to Morrigan after so much time and distance and tragedy between them? Perhaps not, but the way he kissed her temple, squeezed her hand, and called her Sister meant something to her at least. And still, hearing him make that promise eased a small amount of the bitter grudge she was holding against him, even if she had no way to know if he would keep his word to her.
After all, after their mother had died, he had promised he would always be there for her and Evelyn, and yet, he had still put his politics before his family.
“I suppose we will see,” she said softly into his shoulder. This embrace had come almost seven years too late, but affection did not come easily to Morrie and one hug could not make up for all of the love lost between them. So, she eased out of the hug, straightening up and turning back to their mother’s grave, but she kept her tight grip on her brother’s hand nonetheless. As long as she was holding on, he couldn’t go anywhere. “You should visit Evelyn and Father today too. It’s time for you to begin facing the past.”