Page 44 of Forget Me Not
Now she was studying her hands in her lap.
“Lack of blood doesn’t make you any less her aunt for real.” He cocked his head, studying her as if he could figure out all her secrets if he looked hard enough. “Four months old…I guess I just assumed, after all the stories you’ve told me, that you knew Cameron a lot longer than that. How did you meet?”
Syve shrank into herself, pulling her knees up to hug them to her chest.
Brows furrowed, he replayed everything he’d just said over and over again, failing to see what could have made her shut down.
After a long moment she finally whispered, “Long story short? Kayla is a week younger than my son. She needed a little help and I was capable of doing it, so our midwife connected us.”
Son.
Bas flashed back to the first night he had seen her, when he inspected the tombstone after she had left.
Herson.
He felt a crushing weight settle over his body, his heart aching from pain that didn’t belong to him. How had he not made that connection on his own?
Sitting forward and resting his elbows on his knees he whispered, “How?”
She took a shuddering breath and he immediately regretted his question.
“I’m sorry, don’t answer that. That was insensitive,” he amended.
Deep inhale in and slow exhale out, then she said, “You already know I lost Erhard, my husband.” Her voice broke.
Bastien waited patiently, understanding the amount of effort it would take to tell this story.
Syve cleared her throat.
“Noah…my son.”
It was impossible to miss the quiver in her words.
“Both of them—” She sniffled.
He wanted to stop her, to tell her she did not need to continue, then she looked straight at him, unshed tears filling her eyes—she needed to tell their story.
“There was an issue with our heater. We never had it serviced—didn’t even know that was a thing. We’d only ever rented before the loft…They said there must have been a crack in the vent or something. We must have had a small carbon monoxide leak for who knows how long and…one day, it justbroke—split wide open and flooded the house. They couldn’t explain why it happened.” She shuddered.
“I wasn’t home that day. I had gone to Bozeman with Aimi—I just wanted to pick out some fabric. It was really cold that day, the heater would have been running non-stop to keep the apartment warm—they told me it might not have happened so fast if it hadn’t been running so much.” Tears were freely running down her cheeks. “Routine checks of your furnace are very important, at least once a year, and if you don’t have any CO detectors in your house, you should really fix that immediately,” she concluded, sniffling and raising her arm to wipe her face with her shoulder.
No wonder she flinched when he joked about her keeping her shop cold out of spite toward her heater—and CO detectors? He could honestly say he had never once even considered whether their house had carbon monoxide detectors. Actually, he couldn’t be sure he even knew they existed before that very moment. Well, he was absolutely planning to check for them as soon as he got back home.
It occurred to him that he was silently staring at her.
“Bambi. I am so sorry—I know that doesn’t mean anything, but still.”
He wanted to scoot over and hold her, to wipe away the tears that were staining her beautiful face.
“Is that why you don’t want to talk about your brother? He’s gone too, isn’t he?”
Bas ran his hands over his face and up onto his head, then sagged back into the couch.
“Yeah. He’s gone too.” He sighed. “His name was Desiderio. We shifted and went for a run…there was a poacher. I didn’t notice in time.”
Syve covered her mouth with her hand, a look of horror in her eyes.
“You were there?”
