Where Happiness Begins (Evermore #3)

23. Chapter 23

Chapter 23

I t’s been days since Carter told me about everything that went down with his brother and his parents, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Our childhoods couldn’t have been more different. It’s painful to think his family literally abandoned him after he made a decision for himself. I don’t know what particular event drove him to leave the band, and I couldn’t care less. He didn’t deserve to lose the people who were supposed to love him no matter what. And from what I gathered, his family didn’t seem that great even before the band’s downfall. What parent could value their child’s professional success over their happiness? I almost want to fly over there myself to shake them. My mother might’ve walked out on me, but with the father I had, I see Carter’s the one who got the short end of the stick. Dad never made me feel like I needed anything more, and that’s out of sheer luck.

I’ve been standing in front of his bedroom door for who knows how long, clenching and unclenching my hands. As much as I want to turn around, one thing keeps blaring through my mind: I can’t keep ignoring it, ignoring him . Every day I continue walking in front of this door without going in is another day I don’t honor my dad. Hearing Carter’s story was the wake-up call I needed. With everything he gave me, he deserves to have his life recognized, not forgotten, no matter how uncomfortable it is for me to go in there.

“What are you doing?”

I don’t need to look to know Carter is walking in my direction. I could recognize his voice, even his presence, with my eyes closed. I’ve gotten so used to having him around, I’ve learned his tells, learned the pattern of his footsteps and the way he breathes. And even without all of this, I learned how I feel when he’s around as if his aura reaches mine, calming and rooting.

I swallow. “I think it’s time.”

“Yeah?”

I look to my right, where he’s now standing, head tipped down to gaze at me. I never told him what the room truly means to me, but somehow, he knows.

“Yeah.” I’m not avoiding it any longer. Dad would want me to donate his clothes, have them be of use to someone in need. He’d want me to use this space for something else. He’d want me to deal with my grief.

“You don’t have to be there for this,” I add, not quite sure whether I say it for him or for myself. I don’t know how I’ll handle dealing with this stuff. I might not be able to keep a straight face, and Carter probably doesn’t want to have to deal with me being a mess.

As I should have expected, Carter doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes a step forward and opens the door for me. No time allowed for me to back down or chicken out. Pushing right through .

Just like the last time I walked in, I’m first hit with the nostalgia of seeing his room as if he were still there, living in it, and then with the scent of him. I inhale deeply, closing my eyes. God, what I wouldn’t give to smell this on him, his pullover retaining the scent of the detergent as he whizzed past me on his way to get dinner out of the oven. To get one last hug from him.

“Guess being a glass hoarder is familial.”

I open my eyes, following Carter’s gaze to where it’s landed on the five almost empty glasses of water standing on the bedside table.

My smile grows slowly as if testing the waters of whether I actually want to go there. Eventually, though, I can’t control myself and burst out laughing. Carter’s lips tip up, small but so very there, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more grateful for him than I do now.

I haven’t quite caught my breath when I step inside, but the lightness in my chest makes it so much easier. Carter knew what he was doing.

I look around, this time not with a feeling of grief that threatens to drown me, but with purpose. We need to clean this space, just like we did the entire house before. And Carter’s right: Dad was as messy as I am.

I breathe deeply as I look at the clothes I recognize and the trinkets I missed, then say, “All right. Let’s do this.”

“Music on or off?” Carter asks, his phone already out but paused. He’ll leave me in silence if I want to, and yet he knew I wouldn’t. Knew music would help me get through this .

“On,” I say, then grab his phone and find a playlist of seventies rock that my dad would’ve known every single word to. And then, we get to work.

I can’t stop laughing.

“Please stop,” Carter says, voice ice cold.

“I can’t,” I wheeze out. Maybe I could if he removed that stupid hat, but for some reason, he’s kept it on, even though it looks like he’d rather die than wear something so ridiculous for a second longer.

“Lilianne, for the love of God,” he chastises but still doesn’t pull it off.

“Just one more second, please,” I say before looking up at him and bursting out in another fit of laughter. When I found the boater hat at the bottom of Dad’s walk-in closet, I immediately put it on Carter’s head before he could say no, and the image was too good to be true.

“I’m giving you two more seconds and then I’m done.”

I don’t waste the opportunity, grabbing my phone at the speed of light and snapping a picture of him, stone face and all, with the hat flattening all his hair. There. Now I can laugh about it forever.

“You’re impossible,” he says as he finally takes the hat off. He’d already kept it on far longer than anticipated.

Cleaning up this room has been an interesting experience, that’s for sure. At times, I found items I had fond memories of or things I’d been looking for—Nan’s necklace was here, after all, under a pile of papers on his desk—and at other times, I fell upon stuff I’d forgotten he owned, and the thought that some of my memories of him were already slipping away almost brought me to my knees multiple times.

All in all, though, it was survivable, and I only have the big man in front of me to thank for that. It’s as if he can sense my mood and know when I need silence or when I need a breather. Observant as always. Something I don’t think he even recognizes in himself.

“Okay, back to business.” I return inside the closet. We’ve emptied most of the room in the past three hours, from bedding to clothes we could donate and the few things I decided to keep, and now we’re stuck with the little knickknacks. Most of them are useless, but I’d feel terrible throwing them away.

There are a few boxes of things at the bottom of the closet we still need to sort through, so I go to grab one but find it stolen from my hands at the last second.

“I can carry my own boxes.”

“I know,” Carter says, still bringing it all the way to the bare mattress.

“Thank you,” I grumble as I get to it, then start triaging. Thick biographies that go straight to the donate pile. A sweater from our trip to Ogunquit I decide to keep. Random paper documents I’ll go through later.

Then my hand lands on a booklet, and I freeze when I pull it out of the box.

An Alcoholics Anonymous flyer .

I blink, turning it over in my hands as if I’ll find some kind of information about why Dad had this in his stuff. Maybe some kind of message he’d scribbled behind a flyer while talking on the phone.

Nothing.

Frowning, I put it down, then return to the box, only to be met with more of the same.

A Member’s-Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous

A.A. At A Glance

Living Sober

My fingers trace the title of the last flyer. My father never drank in excess. In fact, I don’t remember when the last time I saw him drink alcohol was.

I shake my head as I continue going through file after file on dealing with alcoholism, getting a sponsor, and even becoming a sponsor.

“What’s all this?” Carter asks from the other side of the room.

I open my mouth to answer, but no word seems to come out. I look up at him, probably resembling a fish out of water.

My silence seems to trigger something in him because immediately, he’s in front of me, picking up one flyer, then another. His throat bobs.

“He wasn’t an alcoholic,” I tell Carter, not because it’d have been shameful if he was, but because he couldn’t have been, simple as that.

“Lilianne…” He takes a step closer, pity clouding his eyes.

“He wasn’t.” I pull out even more documents and books from the box as if wanting it to finally be empty. If it’s all out, then I can’t be surprised by anything else, so I grab and grab. My hands are shaking as I throw them with the others. “I knew my father. He wasn’t an alcoholic.”

He repeats my name, this time with a softness that brings tears to my eyes like he’s seeing something I’m not. Then his hands land gently on mine, stopping me in my movements.

“Knowing someone doesn’t mean they can’t have struggles you don’t know about.”

“But he wasn’t struggling,” I say.

His gaze falls to the pile of flyers on the mattress, then comes back to me. “I think maybe he was.”

I shake my head. It’s not possible. “And how would you know that?” I shouldn’t be snapping at him when he’s only trying to help, but he doesn’t understand .

Carter rubs at the back of his neck as he looks at the ceiling, his face losing some of its color, something I’ve never seen on him, except maybe on the day we got married. I’ve just struck a chord I didn’t know existed, and for whatever reason, I wish I could take it back. His always calm exterior crumbles under my eyes, something I hate because I know he must hate the feeling in return.

Silence ensues, and I almost feel bad about rebutting him this way. The thick tension between us remains for so long I think he’s going to move on to another subject and trudge on, but he surprises me by saying, “Because I struggled with it too.”

I force myself to remain as neutral as possible even though deep inside, my jaw falls to the floor. Carter’s like a rock. He doesn’t seem like someone who can struggle .

And yet he says, “I stopped drinking when I got into a drunk accident. Had to face that I had an alcohol use disorder. Was forced to join the AA, and it’s probably what saved my life in the end.”

I blink, not knowing what to say. Is that what made him leave his band? What came between him and his brother?

It all clicks into place. His partying. Saying touring was bad for him. His family not understanding.

Carter sits on the bed, his movements still so careful. “But you could ask everyone I was close with at the time, and they wouldn’t have a clue what I’m talking about.” He cocks his head, a movement that makes him look younger than he is. “You can know someone without knowing all their struggles.”

He has a point. I know he does. I’ve lived with him for months and never knew he had an alcohol problem.

My thoughts start to jumble left and right, memories clashing in my head. The times my father said no to champagne for New Year’s Eve countdown, and I thought he was just accompanying me in my forced sobriety. The times I walked in on him and it looked like he’d had a really rough day, but he pretended like nothing was going on the second he saw me. The multiple times he had appointments he had to attend during the evening, without a clear explanation.

I grind my teeth, then put the flyers back into the box, dumping them all into one pile. There must be another explanation. Because if this is true and Carter’s right, then it means there was a gigantic part of my father’s life I never knew, and I can’t accept that.

“I think that’s enough for today. What do you think? ”

“Lilianne, I—”

“I’m fine.” I put on my bravest smile. “And thank you for sharing. Really.” With a hand on his knee, I say, “I’m so glad you’re doing better, and if you ever struggle again, I’ll be there. You won’t be alone.” I hate to think he got sober by himself. I’ve heard how hard it can be even with a strong entourage, so him being forced to do it without anyone around… He’s so much more than what I’d initially believed. An entire universe.

I give his knee one last squeeze, then get up. “But I still don’t think my father went through the same thing.” Maybe, at some point, he thought he drank too much and decided to slow down, but he didn’t suffer from alcoholism. I would have known.

I spend the rest of the day trying to convince myself of it.