Page 92 of The Spare
Xander handed me a cup filled to the brim with coffee. “What happened?” I asked.
My question summoned the horror the night the Suttons were in the accident. The broken pitch in Marcus’s voice when he asked me the same question was something I couldn’t forget. It was too late by the time he and Henry arrived at the hospital.
Xander had played the match of his life that day, and his parents were there to see it all. They always were. I tagged along to a celebratory dinner, and we all decided to head up to the Sutton family house for the weekend. We usually went out and partied with the team, and his parents went home after dinner. But that night was different; he was set on going home. Xander and I drove a few miles behind his parents’ car.
There was a rain delay. The match started later than scheduled. The roads were still slick and coated in wet fallen leaves. When we caught up to the crash scene, it was gruesome. I tried to keep Xander from seeing it. The sound of his blood-curdling sobs rang in my ears for years.
Xander was a shell of a man for months. Marcus too. My hands shook at the pain they must have been going through today, another funeral reminding them of all they had lost. Another name added to the already long list.
“Doctors say it was cardiac arrest, probably a silent arrhythmia.” Henry shrugged and pulled me from the memory. The tears welled in my eyes. “Probably didn’t feel anything.”
The memory made my body rattle with the sobs I tried to contain. The tears fell like raindrops into my coffee. Xander’s arms wrapped around my shoulders, and his chest muffled my low sobs.
The Suttons’ death affected all of us differently. For me, it made any drastic change something to fear. A morbid anticipation of the fallout made me wary.
“Are you okay?” I asked him. The fear that something would shake them from the happiness in their lives terrified me, especially for Xander. I couldn’t watch him fall back into the pit he was in years ago.
Xander gently pushed me back, his hands on my shoulders. The look of deep concern softened. “You have to stop worrying so much about me.”
“Marcus?” I looked over at him; his expression was pained. Not jealous. Not possessive. He wanted to be the one to comfort me. The secret seemed so minor now. I wish we had told Henry when Xander found out.
He nodded. My gaze lingered on his before it moved to Henry.
I wondered how Henry felt about all of this. To say his relationship with our grandfather was strained was an understatement. “Are you okay?” I asked him.
Henry shrugged again. “I guess.”
“Is it okay that I’m sad but not all that sad?” I asked him. He was the only one who’d understand it. I didn’t know how to explain it. Of course, I was upset that my grandfather was gone. It left a hole in my heart. Almost all the happy memories of my childhood were of his house with my grandmother. Losing him felt like the doorway to that idyllic past was slammed shut. But most of my emotion around today was a fear of how Xander was handling all of it.
I was always close to my grandmother, but my grandfather always had a distance. The company was the most important thing in his world; we were often an afterthought. He loved us, but we never developed any type of relationship with him that centered around anything outside of the company.
“That makes two of us.” Henry smiled softly. “He was a complicated man.”
After I finished getting myself together, Henry and I went to see my parents. Services would be tomorrow, so Henry and I decided to stay with them for the night.
CHAPTER47
Marcus
After the services, the family returned to their Manhattan home.
Sloan and Henry’s father, Shaan, let his children know what everyone long expected. He planned to step away from duties with the company. It was an open secret and the reason why the board was so keen on monitoring Henry’s behavior.
Xander and I were going to leave when Sloan brought a pile of albums out and laid them on the coffee table. “You guys, look at these pictures of Henry at his first tennis match.”
She pulled the photos out of the album, and we settled back in for a while longer. The moments when the family settled together always bothered me. Xander seemed to melt right in, but I always felt slightly out of place.
“Marcus, would you help me with some of these photos?” Sloan’s mother, Beatrice, asked. It surprised the entire group, but everyone was absorbed in another photo a few seconds later. It was a well-known fact that she loved Xander. The two had a standing lunch in the city for years.
“There are a ton more albums downstairs,” Sloan explained, not looking up when Xander drew her attention to another embarrassing picture of Henry.
Resting behind an unassuming brick façade, the Amari residence in Manhattan was deceptively large. Its five stories unfolded around a central spiral staircase, each depositing you to a sprawling marble landing. I only stepped out of the salon a minute after Beatrice, but by the time I walked through the corridor, she was gone down the grand staircase.
The distinctive clack of her heels led me downstairs. The first floor housed an expansive gym, a playroom, and an office. A box of albums sat in front of the office. I walked to the office door, and spindles of dread wrapped around me. I never been far enough into an adult relationship to meet the parents. But I’d known the Amaris my entire adult life. That had to count.
Beatrice stood behind the large mahogany desk in front of a stack of books with an open photo album at the top. There was a stack of old albums on the desk next to the pile of books, and a few strewn about the room. It was the most disorganized I’d ever seen it.
“These?” I asked. She shook her head and motioned for me to look at the album she’d opened. Beatrice was amiable, as always. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a neat bun, a proper society mother. Her perfectly manicured finger pointed to a photograph.
