Whispers of a Broken Halo by Abbi Glines

I knocked on the door and noticed the curtain covering the window move. I was glad she was being careful. For the kid’s sake at least. From the way things looked, Bryn was all he had in this world. He clung to her as if he understood that. Where the fuck was his dad?

Bryn opened the door, paused, and studied me a moment. I thought perhaps she was going to tell me she didn’t need me to stay now that Henley wasn’t here to demand it. If that had been on her mind, she pushed it aside and moved back so that I could come in.

I was glad she’d made it easy because her telling me to leave wouldn’t have done any good. We would have just ended up fighting, and I would have won.

She glanced back at the sofa, and I followed her gaze. Cullen had fallen asleep and was now slumped over.

“I need to get him in bed. The kitchen is right through there. Make yourself at home,” she said without once stuttering, then walked over to the sofa. She moved the blanket off Cullen, then went to pick him up.

“Do you want me to do that?” I asked her.

She shook her head and scooped him into her arms, then headed for the hallway. I waited until they disappeared into a bedroom before heading toward the kitchen. I noticed the chocolate chip cookies that sat on a cake plate by the stove. I wondered if that was something Bryn had made with Cullen.

There were drawings and artwork covering the front of the fridge door. The drawings all had the sky, sun, grass, and stick people. All but one of them only had two people in them. The drawing that was on the very top had three. It was clear that it was Cullen, Bryn, and Tory. A much smaller figure stood between two others, and they were all holding hands.

I looked down at the next drawing and studied it. The much shorter figure was holding an ice cream cone in his hand. The taller one was smiling beside him. The brown hair told me who it was, and as I studied the other drawings, the taller figure was always the same. Bryn. Never his mother, who he would have given blonde hair. Although both sisters were blondes, Bryn’s was a darker blonde, almost a golden brown. Tory was a paler blonde.

“I have to rotate the artwork every other week. Cullen loves to draw, and there isn’t enough room on the fridge for all of it. I started putting the ones I take down in a scrapbook for memories. Years from now, we can go back and look at how his drawing evolved and changed through the pages.”

I glanced back at Bryn, who wasn’t looking at me, but at Cullen’s art, smiling.

“That sounds like a lot of work,” I replied. Unable to admit I was impressed with her dedication to making sure Cullen had memories from his childhood. Neither she nor I had that, and neither of us wanted to remember that time either.

She shrugged, then walked past me toward the sink. “Not really. He takes the time to create them. I can take the time to display them and keep them.”

I stood, watching her as she filled a glass with water. It was things like this that didn’t fit into the Bryn I knew now. The crazy one who’d beaten the hell out of my truck. The one who served drinks, topless.

She took a drink, her gaze now locked on me. “You know, Rio, the image in your head you have of me is wrong. I think deep down, you already know that,” she said without stammering over her words once.

She hadn’t stuttered since I’d walked back in the apartment. Her control of it was impressive. It wasn’t something I had witnessed until now.

She continued to study me, and I wasn’t going to defend myself by pointing out why I had the image in my head of her that I did. This was her apartment, and I was here because I wanted the kid to be safe. Tomorrow, I would leave and handle things to make sure there wouldn’t be any more of these nights.

“When did your stutter begin to fade?” I asked her, changing the subject.

“It didn’t fade. I learned some techniques to help control it,” she replied, taking another drink of water.

“I think this is the first time I’ve heard you speak without one at all,” I said.

She shrugged. “That’s because you make it hard for me, and then speaking becomes difficult.”

“How?” I asked her.

She raised an eyebrow and set her glass down on the counter. “By being a complete ass,” she replied, then gave me a smile that didn’t meet her eyes before walking past me and leaving the kitchen.

I listened to her footsteps as she walked away and back down the hallway. There had been no response to that anyway. I was glad she had left. Talking about things with her would lead nowhere good. We just had to get through tonight.

Opening the fridge, I found a small bottle of apple juice and took it.

“First bedroom on the right is yours for the night. If you need a shower, the bathroom is the very next door down. Towels are under the sink,” Bryn told me, and I turned to see her standing in the doorway again. “Eat some of those cookies. Cullen wanted to make them, and we will never eat them all,” she added. Then, once again, she walked away, leaving me there, alone in her kitchen.





Chapter Eighteen

Bryn

The screaming woke me, and I swung my feet out of bed. When they hit the cold hardwood, I noticed the clock by my bed said 2:08. This was about the same time Cullen had experienced his last night terror. Jerking open my bedroom door, I ran to his room. Cullen’s face was illuminated by the Spider-Man night-light I always left on for him and the moonlight cascading through the windows.