Page 74 of Off the Post

I clench my fists and take deep breaths to quell the growing outburst I feel coming. I don’t want to do it on the phone, but Anna can see it all over my face.

“Soren,” she whispers softly, “I still miss Günther more than ever. Don’t ever think that I’ve forgotten about him. I still write in my journal every night. It’s my way of telling him about our lives, sharing stories of his children and how much I see him in things Clara and Henry do or say. He is always present in my heart.” Anna’s eyes fill with tears, which begin to slowly fall over her cheeks. She wipes them away, and in the background, I hear the kids arguing. I smile sadly.

It reminds me of how Günther and I used to squabble over the stupidest things. We would fight and joke and rail on each other like all brothers do. He was my best friend and was always there for me when I needed him most.

And now it feels like Anna is pulling away and moving on. For the first time in my life, I truly feel lonely, with no one else to share my life with.

Ali’s face comes to mind. I think of the light she has sparked inside of me in the short time I’ve known her, the way her smile turns my heart into a blazing inferno inside my chest. Her bright aura removed the darkness in my life.

Anna looks behind her as the kids come stomping down the stairs. She turns back to me and wipes away all remnants of her sadness, then smiles for the sake of her children. And perhaps to placate me.

“I’ve got to get going now, Soren,” she says. I can hear the keys she picks up from the bowl on the table just inside their mudroom. “I want you to consider something for me, please. I’ve learned from my grief counseling that there’s no one right way to experience grief. It’s not a weakness and there’s no timeline for getting through it. But the key is to give yourself grace and shed the guilt and blame that holds you back.”

I’m brought up short. Anna’s words pierce the balloon of sorrow I’ve held tightly in my heart for so fucking long.

She gives me one last smile and a wave and turns the phone so I can see Henry and Clara as they put on their shoes. “Say goodbye to your uncle, kids.”

“Goodbye, Uncle Soren,” says Clara, who grabs a bag from a hook and throws it over her shoulder. Her long blond braid gets stuck under the bag strap, and she frees it without looking back.

Henry gives me a wave and a giant smile, and I see traces of my brother’s face in his.

“Talk to you guys later,” I say, swallowing down the lump of emotion that sits in the base of my throat. And when Anna appears in the frame one last time, her expression is filled with love.

“We love you, Soren. We just want you to be happy and to see you smile again.”

I drop my phone on the couch and hang my head in my hands.

Happy and smiling.

When was the last time that happened?

Oh, right. When I was with Ali.

Something clicks in me. I pick up my phone again and scroll through my contacts, looking for a number I was given by Nat Stinson several years earlier.

Then I do something I never thought I’d do.

I reach out and ask for help.

37

Ali

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod. Oh, shit. Holy shit.”

My voice grows infinitely louder with each word I utter until I slap my hand over my mouth to keep a scream from ripping free from my throat.

How could I let this happen? I gape, bewildered and terrified, at the screen in front of me. Then I drop my head into my hands. If I weren’t in the office, I’d be wailing and sobbing ugly tears over this terrible, horrible, completely avoidable error I made.

The mistake blinks back at me in the form of an email I composed a week ago. The one I’d written, saved, and modified after hours at home. The invitation I supposedly had scheduled to go out to thousands of donors and vendors for the upcoming event at the park.

But it didn’t.

Instead, it stares accusingly at me from my monitor, sitting in scheduled-and-unsent mode, waiting. Now in panic mode, I search my history tracking and find exactly where it happened. I was hoping, rightly or wrongly, that the reason behind the unsent mail was due to a system failure. We had been dealing with issues on our website backend that week, after all.

But the email in question not sending was totally operator error. And the operator is me.

It’s scheduled to be sent out on August twentieth. Which is two weeks from today. And is the actual date of the event itself.