Free The Snow Angel by Glenn Beck, Nicole Baart

Full of holes.”
    Cooper laughs. “I like that. Swiss cheese.”
    “I can almost taste it,” Mitch says. “Swiss cheese, I mean. Why can I remember the taste of cheese, but I can’t remember how to play chess?”
    “You were never a very good chess player.”
    “I wasn’t?”
    “Nah.” Cooper gives Mitch a serious look. “You only started playing because your daughter joined the chessclub in high school. You wanted to be able to play with her. Do you remember that?”
    Mitch holds his breath, trying to conjure up the image of playing chess with his teenage daughter. How tall was she? Did she have dark hair or light? Blue eyes or brown? Green? It breaks his heart that he can’t picture her, but just as he is about to give up he feels a flicker of her at the very edge of his memory.
    She’s a wisp of a thing, slight and lovely with big, haunted eyes. Mitch is leveled by a yearning to pull her out of the past and hold her, she looks so life-weary and broken. But as much as he wants to hug her now, he can’t fight the sudden knowledge that he didn’t often hold her when he had the chance.
    “I was a bad father,” Mitch says, his voice cracking.
    Cooper shakes his head. “You weren’t a bad father.”
    “I didn’t know how to be a father. Especially the father of a daughter. What did I know about little girls?”
    “Well, it’s not like children come with instruction manuals. You did the best you could.”
    “I don’t think my best was good enough.” Mitch battles the quick and furious desire to fling the chess-board off the table. To shout. To break something. But what would that accomplish? He knows that things were thrown in his home, and that they had no peace toshow for it. All the fight fizzles out of him. “She was sad, wasn’t she?”
    “That wasn’t your fault,” Cooper says, but it’s little consolation. “Life is sad sometimes.”
    “My wife …” Mitch trails off, afraid to finish the sentence. “My wife said things, and she did things …”
    “See?” Cooper sweeps his hands as if Mitch’s unfinished thought excuses everything. “Your wife did things. Not you.”
    “Does it matter who did what?” Mitch may not remember his address or what his teenage daughter looked like, but he does know that there are sins of omission as surely as there are sins of commission. Whether or not he did anything, he carries the guilt of turning a blind eye. It’s devastating. He can’t stand the man that he thinks he was, and he can’t recognize the man that he is. The past is a blur of emotion and fragments of memories that make him feel dizzy and bewildered. He wants nothing more than to be able to lay the years out before him—ugliness and all—and see his life for what it really was. He can’t shake the feeling that it was one colossal failure.
    “I can see her, Cooper.” Mitch takes his head in his hands and tries to make the flicker of a girl in his mind’s eye stay put. “I can see her but I can’t touch her. I can’t say the things that I want to say to her.”
    Cooper’s silence stretches on so long that Mitch finally looks up. The man across from him is wearing an expression that is rife with pity. With compassion. “What would you say to her if you could?”
    Mitch doesn’t pause for a second. “I’d tell her that I’m sorry. That I should have protected her.” He squeezes his eyes shut and makes a wish on every single flake of falling snow. “I’d tell her that I love her.”

CHAPTER 7
     

R ACHEL
    October 8
     
    I found Lily in the center of her four-poster bed with the white lace curtains drawn. Her knees were pulled up to her chest and her eyes were squeezed shut, but even from behind the veil of translucent fabric I could see that she wasn’t asleep. My Sleeping Beauty who was too heartbroken to slumber.
    “Is this seat taken?” It was a lame attempt at humor, and Lily didn’t respond. Instead of waiting for an invitation, I pushed aside the sheer screen