CHAPTER 3
Cheyenne
This is important, I told myself. Pay attention.
I sat on the back porch with my siblings and their significant others and tried to will myself to sober up and pay attention to my oldest brother Hank, who’d called a family meeting. The last thing I wanted was for my brothers to think that I didn’t care or wasn’t taking this seriously.
Ten months ago, I’d returned to Firefly Island for the will reading of the man that I thought was my father James Comfort and my brothers hadn’t even recognized me. I couldn’t blame them, since I’d been gone for twenty years and if I was being honest with myself, I wouldn’t have known who they were if I’d passed them on the street.
But since then we’d been bonding, getting closer. Well, I should say Billy and Jimmy and I had. Hank barely spoke to me, which was another reason I needed to get myself together. He wouldn’t have called a family meeting in the middle of our brother’s reception if it hadn’t been important.
Sit up straight and listen.
I flinched. The voice in my head sounded a lot like my grandmother. She might not have been great in the nurturing department, but she was a chastising champion.
Chastising champion. I giggled internally. That rhymes.
No. I shook my head. It didn’t rhyme, but it sounded cool.
Stop it.
This time the voice in my head was me.
Just focus.
I blinked and saw that Hank was holding a letter and explaining that our mom had put it under his pillow the night of her accident, but he’d never told anyone about it. He was telling us now because he had new information about my mom’s car accident, mainly that she hadn’t been alone. A man named Wayne was driving.
Oh boy, this is important.
There was so much mystery surrounding the night we lost our mom. We’d all been trying to uncover the real story for months. I really should not have had those shots of tequila. Or the glass of champagne during the toast.
The Cliffs notes were Sabrina Comfort died over twenty years ago in a car accident and we’d thought she’d been alone. Then ten months ago James Comfort—the man that I’d always thought was my father but was actually just my brothers’ father—died and it came to light that my mother had left behind a trust worth fifty million dollars to us, her children. But that trust hadn’t been released because there was suspected foul play in her death. The police report had been redacted, so that hadn’t been much help.
Now, from what my alcohol-soaked brain was managing to absorb, Hank was telling us that there was no foul play, her death had been an accident.
Yay!
That was good news. That meant no one had killed her, which we’d been worried about. One mystery down, one more to solve.
I knew that I was supposed to be listening to my brother but all I could think about was that I didn’t know who my real father was. James Comfort had raised me as his own until my mom died when I was five. At her funeral, her parents, who I’d never met, showed up and tore me out of my brother Billy’s arms. Literally. The last memory I had was of my brother Billy trying to hold onto me and my “father” looking down and shaking his head as he allowed two people who were strangers to me, take me away.
After that, no one in my life ever spoke about my brothers or James Comfort. My grandparents hated the man they blamed for taking their little girl, my mom, away from them.
And they weren’t fans of my brothers either. To this day, I still didn’t understand why. They didn’t even know them, and Jimmy had only been two when our mom died. What could he have possibly done?
I only ever heard them refer to them once. My grandmother vowed that “James Comfort’s demon seeds” would never get a penny of my mother’s inheritance. I knew that even now that there was proof that the crash was an accident, they would still do everything in their power to keep the money from my brothers.
I’d zoned out when I noticed that everyone’s eyes were looking at me.
Even though I had no idea what I was agreeing with, I nodded my head. “Yeah.”
I watched as my oldest brother took a deep breath to see if I’d answered correctly. When he started talking my shoulders sagged in relief.
“When it first happened, even I couldn’t face it. I was only thirteen. And then after a while, life just moved on. You guys didn’t really ask about her. And you know how Pop was about her. I just didn’t want to hurt him any more than he already was. And also, I wanted to protect her. I just wanted you guys to remember her the way she was, not anything else.”
Pieces of what he’d read from the letter floated back into my altered consciousness and clicked into place. I realized that Hank had thought that the letter she’d left him was a suicide note all this time, but now he knew it wasn’t. She was just running away with a man and that was a letter saying goodbye and she’d be back for us.
I wondered what would make a mother leave her four children, not in a judgmental way. I was really curious because I barely remembered her. Everyone said she loved us kids, but the few memories I had weren’t of a loving mother. Not that I’d ever tell anyone that.