Four Of A Kind

Chapter 74: [2.47] A Lot of Falling is a Lot of Living

Cassidy Renée Valentine’s combat boots crunched against the gravel path as she stormed through the east garden, past the rose bushes her mother never visited, past the fountain that hadn’t worked since last summer, until she reached the wooden gate that led to the Japanese wing.

The gate creaked when she pushed it open.

She hated that sound. She loved that sound.

Papa had always meant to oil the hinges. He never got around to it.

The zen garden spread before her in the fading twilight, the raked gravel catching the last orange rays of sunset. Stone lanterns lined the path, unlit, their bases covered in moss that the groundskeepers kept trimming and that kept growing back anyway. The red maple tree in the corner had started changing colors early this year. Papa would have noticed that. He noticed everything about this garden.

Cassidy dropped onto the wooden engawa, the same spot where Sabrina had been reading earlier, where Papa used to sit for hours with his tea and his thoughts and his quiet smile.

She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

This was stupid. This was so incredibly stupid.

Getting mad about a name on a cup. A cashier’s name. Some random girl who made boba for a living. Who cared? Not Cassidy. Definitely not Cassidy.

Except she’d stormed out of dinner like a child throwing a tantrum. In front of her sisters. In front of HIM.

“Stupid,” she muttered to the koi pond.

The fish didn’t respond. They just kept doing their fish thing, mouths opening and closing at the surface, waiting for food that wasn’t coming.

A breeze rustled through the bamboo. The sound was hollow. Lonely.

Cassidy tightened her arms around her legs.

Why did she care about some boba shop girl? Why did Isaiah remembering one name make her chest feel like someone had reached in and squeezed? She barely knew him. He was just her tutor. Just the help. Just some scholarship kid with tired eyes and a stupid calm face and hands that somehow steadied her when everything else felt like chaos.

She wasn’t jealous.

She WASN’T.

Jealousy implied she wanted something. And she didn’t want anything from Isaiah Angelo. Not his attention. Not his approval. Not the way he looked at her like she was worth figuring out instead of worth giving up on.

Her vision blurred.

No. Absolutely not. Cassidy Valentine did not cry. Crying was weakness. Crying was admitting that things hurt. And things didn’t hurt. She was fine. She was always fine.

A tear slid down her cheek anyway.

Then another.

She wiped them away with the back of her hand, angry at herself for producing them in the first place.

The koi pond rippled in the breeze. The water reflected the darkening sky, purples and oranges bleeding together like a watercolor painting someone had left out in the rain.

Papa used to bring her here when she was upset.

“Cassie, mon petit feu d’artifice, why do you cry?”

She was eight years old, her knees scraped from falling off her bike, her pride wounded more than her skin. The other girls at the park had laughed when she crashed. Valentines weren’t supposed to be clumsy. Valentines weren’t supposed to fail.

Papa sat beside her on the engawa, his suit jacket discarded somewhere inside, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He smelled like cologne and pipe tobacco and the wine he pretended not to drink after dinner.

“I’m not crying,” she insisted, even as tears streamed down her face.

“Ah. My mistake. It must be raining. Only on your cheeks. Very localized weather we are having today.”

She giggled despite herself. Papa always made her giggle.

He reached into his pocket and produced a handkerchief. Not the fancy silk one he used for business dinners, but the soft cotton one covered in tiny hearts that he kept specifically for her.

“Here. For the localized rain.”

She took it. Wiped her face. Blew her nose with the gracelessness of an eight-year-old who didn’t care about decorum.

Papa didn’t flinch. He just smiled.

“Now. Tell me. What is so terrible that my little firecracker has gone out?”

“I fell off my bike. In front of everyone. They all laughed.”

“I see. And this is the end of the world?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. The world looks very much intact from here.” He gestured at the garden. “The maple is still red. The koi are still hungry. The bamboo still makes that sound you pretend to hate.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Falling?”

“Everyone seeing me fall.”

Papa was quiet for a moment. He looked out at the garden, at the perfectly raked gravel and the carefully placed stones and the water that reflected the sky.

“Do you know why I built this garden, Cassie?”

She shook her head.

“Because your grandmother, my mother, she told me that a man should always have a place to fall. Not in front of others. Not where people can see. But a private place. A garden. A room. A quiet moment.” He looked at her with those warm brown eyes that always saw too much. “Everyone falls, mon petit feu d’artifice. The trick is not to never fall. The trick is to have somewhere safe to land.”

“This is your landing place?”

“This is my landing place.”

She leaned against his arm, and he wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Can it be my landing place too?”

“Always, Cassie. For as long as I live and longer. This garden is for every Valentine who needs to fall. For you and your sisters and your children and their children after that.”

“That’s a lot of falling.”

“That is a lot of living. Same thing, really.”

Cassidy’s chest heaved with a sob she couldn’t suppress.

She was in the landing place. But Papa wasn’t here to catch her anymore.

Two years. It had been two years since the hospital. Since the machines stopped beeping. Since everything good in her world collapsed into a hole she still couldn’t climb out of.

And she was crying over a boy.

How pathetic was that? How absolutely, completely pathetic?

Papa would have known what to say. Papa always knew what to say. He would have sat beside her and made some ridiculous joke about localized weather and she would have laughed and everything would have felt manageable again.

But Papa was gone, and nothing felt manageable, and she was sitting alone in the dark crying over a scholarship kid who remembered some cashier’s name.

A crunch on the gravel path.

Cassidy’s head snapped up. She wiped her face quickly, already composing the verbal destruction she was about to unleash on Isaiah Angelo for following her here, for invading her space, for seeing her like this.

But it wasn’t Isaiah.

Three figures stood at the garden gate. Wine-red hair in varying styles. Purple eyes reflecting the last light of sunset.

Harlow. Vivienne. Sabrina.

Her sisters.

“Go away,” Cassidy said. Her voice came out hoarse. Broken.

Nobody moved.

“I said GO AWAY.”

Harlow was the first to step through the gate. Her fuzzy cat slides made almost no sound on the gravel path. She crossed the garden without hesitation and dropped onto the engawa beside Cassidy.

She didn’t say anything. She just sat.

Vivienne followed, her posture somehow still perfect even as she lowered herself onto the wooden planks with the kind of grace that made Cassidy want to scream. She sat on Cassidy’s other side, close enough that their shoulders almost touched.

Sabrina was last. She drifted across the garden like a ghost, her burgundy dress trailing behind her, and settled at the end of the engawa with her legs dangling over the edge.

The four of them sat in silence.

The koi pond rippled.

The bamboo swayed.

A bird somewhere in the maple tree sang the last notes of its evening song.

“I’m fine,” Cassidy said. “I don’t need whatever this is.”

“Okay.” Harlow’s voice was soft.

More silence.

Cassidy felt another tear escape. She didn’t bother wiping it away.

“He said something.” Vivienne’s voice was quiet. Almost hesitant. “Isaiah. After you left.”

“I don’t care what he said.”

“He said sometimes what people want and what they need are different things.”

Cassidy’s jaw tightened. Of course he did. Of course that infuriating, observant, annoyingly insightful boy would say something like that.

“So you’re here because the help told you to be?”

“We’re here because we wanted to be.” Sabrina’s voice drifted from the end of the engawa. “And because we needed to be. Both things can be true.”

“Since when do you do things anyone needs?”

“Since always. I’m just quiet about it.”