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— REESE STARED AT THE wedding album that had been hidden away in her closet, flicking the ashes that grew from her dwindling cigarette into an empty wine bottle. The photographs were of two happy people, smiling brightly at the camera. Reese's aunt Elizabeth was dressed in a elegant white dress with puffed shoulders — it was the eighties, after all — and was slow dancing with a young man in a neat, oil black tuxedo. He had a nice smile. Reese wondered what happened to him. If what Elizabeth had told her was true, then this man was most likely dead.
The house was empty, her aunt having left for a walk with the twins — and Poppy had tagged along — who had been weeping; it was only natural, given the fact that it was December tenth: Paul's birthday. They were still young, and Reese was sure that they didn't have the faintest idea of what the day actually was, but they could feel the energy around those who did. Reese could feel it too; that web of sadness tightening around her, cutting off her oxygen supply and leaving her gasping for breath. Paul would have been thirty five. In Minnesota, Mallory would have baked a cake that always seemed to be missing something — she wasn't very good at following instructions — and the twins would have devoured half the frosting. Reese would be making a pretty banner, using the crayons that were lying around to write out Happy Birthday Dad in big letters. They always took each others birthday's off, so that they could spend time together doing whatever it was that the birthday person wanted; Paul liked to spend his twenty-four hours playing board games and singing off key to his favorite songs — mostly Kenny Loggins. But in Washington, today was nothing special. They'd all gone to school and work, and pretended that they didn't feel like their hearts were about to shatter.
Elizabeth asked if Reese had wanted to join them on their walk, but the teenager declined. She just needed some time for herself. She'd planed to break into her aunt's liquor cabinet and down a bottle of whatever she could find, but when she'd opened her closet to grab the spare pack of cigarettes she kept in there, the wedding album fell off the shelf and nearly landed on her feet. Feeling as if that was a sign, she'd ditched her previous getting-shit-faced drunk idea and decided to look into what happened to her aunt's husband. She had a google tab open on the article titled Richard Hummel Obituary. So far, all she had gotten from the funeral website was that he had tragically drowned in a river not to far from his house. The odd part, was that he had been a star swimmer. Captain of his High School swim team and almost went pro before he shattered his shoulder in a car accident, effecting his speed.
