Page 3 of Sing with Me

A realization hit Diehl. He had left the French doors open. “Really, Brin should put a screen here so that the mosquitoes don’t fly in.”

The open door meant he hadn’t set the alarm in the middle of the night when he arrived. He had driven all the way from Atlanta instead of flying in their family jet because Mom wanted to use it to pick up the kids from Hawaii, where they had been staying with their maternal grandparents for the school year.

It was summer now, and the two sets of grandparents were negotiating how to share their grandchildren between Hawaii and Georgia.

Diehl opted to stay out of it.

Anyway, he drove to St. Simon’s the night before in his Ram 1500—just in case Brooks Restoration had any work for him to do while he was in town—and fell asleep without showering or unpacking or setting the house alarm.

Nobody broke in—he hoped. He had slept through it all, in any case.

Diehl climbed back into bed. It was a big bed, too big for one person, but in many ways, it was better to be alone than to have a bickering wife.

Bickering?

Diehl stared at the ceiling.

He could not recall many moments of bliss with Isobel. They always fought. They fought so much that his sister Brinley had to break up their quarrels. Mostly words, which Diehl could have won hands down.

To his credit, he had never lifted a fist at Isobel.

Or at the children, who had to put up with their mom and dad arguing every time they were together. It was always the little things, like which restaurant to eat out at or whether Elisa should be allowed to wear short skirts and put on makeup before she reached puberty. Family stuff.

Isobel had always complained about everything. She hated their neighbors—who were almost never there. She hated Atlanta, with its humid summers. She hated the Georgia coast—too plain compared to Amalfi. She hated everything.

Diehl found peace at the office. He loved working. Work was life to him, and life was work.

Ironically, not for the rest of summer this year.

Banished to the Georgia coast to rest his brain and heal his heart, Diehl had opted not to stay in the Brooks family home on Seaside Island. Not with Mom constantly nagging about how he wasnotraising his two children.

Wasn’t having a full-time bilingual nanny with a bachelor’s degree in sociology not enough?

Maybe Dad should put Mom to work. Then she would stop harassing Diehl about the kids.

Then again, poor Mom. She hardly saw her grandchildren.

Every Christmas for years, Isobel had taken the kids to Hawaii, where her parents lived, running that pineapple plantation of theirs. It was warm in Hawaii in December, and the kids loved it. However, it meant that Diehl’s own parents hadn’t been able to spend Christmas with the kids for years.

So he could see why Mom was all agitated with her sudden role as mother figure now that Isobel was…

Dead.

Gone.

Diehl found himself sobbing softly into the down pillows.

The mother of his children. The woman he had married on the Amalfi Coast twelve years ago, divorced when their first-born Elisa was only seven years old, and remarried when their daughter turned ten and their son turned seven.

“Why did I remarry her?” Diehl couldn’t pin down a reason.

Somewhere in the noise, he found out that Isobel’s bank account was dry. All those millions she had gotten from the divorce proceedings were gone in three years.

Did he feel sorry for her? Isobel needed him. He liked being needed.

So he remarried her.

Several months into their second marriage, Isobel flew to her vacation home in Positano and bought that Huayra. She called from Italy, asking if she could stay for a few months there—alone. No husband, no kids. To catch her breath, she said. Their second time around had been a whirlwind to her.

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