Ask Me for Tomorrow Read Online Free Page A

of morning sky that Dean could see from bed was bruised with thunderclouds, and the wind sounded like the wail and whistle of lost souls. He closed his eyes and wondered whether he was happy that the world mirrored the grey within him, or whether it would have been nicer to celebrate Bree’s birthday under the golden sun she’d loved so much.
    Either way it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t see this day. It would come and go without her bell-like laugh and her smiling eyes, and the only people who would care about the weather were the people undoubtedly on their way to the house now.
    Bree would have been thirty-four today if she hadn’t died senselessly two and a half years ago. She’d slipped on soap in the shower and broken her neck.
    A part of Dean had died that day too. His heartache might have poisoned his body if it hadn’t been for his son and daughter; thanks to them, he’d endured. Rowan and Nina had grown thirty-odd centimetres between them since their mother had passed, and they were used to her being gone now. Dean was too, in a lot of ways.
    Time had marched on for the survivors. It hadn’t been easy, but it hadn’t been optional either.
    It had taken a long time before he could go ten minutes without thinking about Bree, and he still suffered on the special days. Getting out of bed each day had been hard, but every day he’d rallied, and he’d smiled, and he’d worked damn hard at convincing everyone that he was a functional, emotionally stable human being. Eventually, he’d stopped acting that way and started being that way instead.
    But getting better hadn’t been without its setbacks. Not counting his family and closest friends, no one really expected him to ever move on. Obviously, he missed the woman he’d vowed to love for the rest of his life – she was like a ghost limb, a constant presence in this house and in his children – but the unthinkable had parted them. There were some people who spoke to him as if he was a broken man, and others who couldn’t take the sympathy out of their expressions.
    Some days he hated the townspeople’s pity and other days he just hated himself. There wasn’t a manual he could refer to – he had no idea when he was allowed to move on, or if what he was feeling was natural. Was it wrong to look forward? Wasn’t that what Bree would have wanted?
    He didn’t want to stand in the rain with a bunch of people and talk about Bree and the birthday she’d missed. If he’d had his way, he would’ve had a wine at dinner then hugged his kids tightly to commemorate the day. Did that make him a bad person? A reprobate widower? Did it even mean anything?
    Dean pushed the doona and sheet down the bed and swung his feet onto the floor. Today was going to suck – whatever the weather – and moping in bed wasn’t going to move things along any faster.
    When he trudged into the hallway, Nina’s bedroom door was open. Looking inside, he saw that her pyjamas were folded at the bottom of her neatly made bed, which could only mean that Sam was here. This afforded him a degree of reassurance. It would be good for him to start this day with people as optimistic as Sam and Ethan. They’d been a constant source of comfort for Dean and his little family. Ethan had returned to Hinterdown at the same time as Bree’s funeral, and although the brothers’ reunion had been a rocky one, they’d come to find a deep friendship in one another again; shared, of course, with their mate since childhood, the newly engaged Caleb O’Hara, Samantha’s brother.
    The O’Hara family had been an extension of Dean’s own for over twenty years, and he was grateful that they were rallying around him today.
    He checked Rowan’s room but it, too, was empty and in an unusual state of cleanliness.
    Nobody was in the kitchen when he shuffled in, nor in the living room where people were often found slumped on the couch.
    Outside, then, he thought as he stepped into his yard shoes and