It’s almost a year since Rhett died, and his mother is determined to have a family gathering to commemorate the anniversary, which means Deacon will be making one of his incredibly rare trips home. But after years of constant flip-flopping between hope and despair, remission and resurgence, the quiet monotony of his life now – a life with no expectations and no disappointments – is somehow comforting.īut Julian’s quietly dull existence is about to get shaken up. Since Rhett’s death a year before, Julian has been barely existing, drifting from day to day, working in a bar at night, living in the house he shared with Rhett and just… stuck in a never ending cycle of numbness and grief – for Rhett and for the life they’ll never have. Julian and Rhett became best friends, then fell in love and later moved in together, but the last few years – watching the man he loved battling a terrible disease and losing the fight – have torn Julian to shreds. He and Rhett quickly became inseparable and Julian became a big favourite with Rhett’s mother – with all the Suttons in fact, except for Deacon who, for reasons Julian never understood, never liked him and never troubled to hide that dislike.
Julian Reid grew up in the foster system, and at nine years old he went to live with the family who lived next door to the Suttons. Things at home got worse the sicker Rhett got, and Deacon couldn’t get away fast enough after high school he moved to Seattle for college, and still lives there, running a successful automotive business with his best friend.
This feeling was only exacerbated when his younger brother Rhett was diagnosed with leukaemia at seventeen, and Deacon became either invisible or was the target of his mother’s continual comparisons, disappointment or reminders that his brother could die, and it was up to him (Deacon) to live for him.
With two such terrific narrators as Teddy Hamilton and Tim Paige, it was a no-brainer.įor most of his childhood and adolescence Deacon Sutton felt like the wrong puzzle piece in his family, the child who never met expectations, never quite fit in and was never enough, no matter how hard he tried. About a week later, I saw the audio version on a Coming Soon list and decided that was the way to go. It’s not a storyline I normally seek out, but I was intrigued enough to look up Without Youon Amazon and thought I’d give it a try. Marley Valentine is a new-to-me author, and to be honest, this book wasn’t even on my radar until I saw it mentioned on an FB group (I can’t remember which one!) in which someone had asked for recommendations for romances that featured a widow falling for her late husband’s brother.
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