Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“Letters,” she says, like she’s tasting a word that doesn’t belong to us anymore.
“Yeah.”
Her cheeks flush and drain. “You… sent them?”
“No.”
The hope I didn’t realize was in her eyes dies like a match in wind. She stares at me, hurt unraveling into anger, and that anger looks good on her. Alive. Fierce.
“So you didn’t give up,” she says, voice tight, “you just… wrote to the ghost of me? That’s your defense?”
“My defense,” I say evenly, “is the truth.”
“Which is?”
“I wrote because it was the only way to quiet the thing that wouldn’t stop talking.” I slide my hand along the edge of the cabinet because if I don’t touch something I’m going to touch her. “I didn’t send them because every time I put your name on an envelope I remembered the night your house burned and I couldn’t get to you. I remembered your father—”
She flinches.
“—and I remembered that fire started in my place.”
There it is. The wire I’ve been wrapped in for a decade, stripped bare in the light of the rig.
She shakes her head. “Axel, no—”
“I knew the panel was old,” I say, words coming faster now that the dam cracked. “We were saving to replace it and we didn’t do it fast enough. The wiring jumped. Your roof caught. Your father—” My voice turns to gravel. “Your father ran back in because you were up those stairs. And he didn’t come back out.”
“You think that’s your fault,” she says slowly, like it’s absurd and like it makes horrible sense all at once.
“I know it’s my fault,” I say. “I live in it.”
Silence sits with us. We both listen to the rig tick as it cools.
She steps forward. Not much. Enough. “I never blamed you.”
“I did,” I say.
“Then you’ve been wrong,” she fires back, heat rising. “For ten years.”
I hold her stare. “I watched an entire family’s history burn because ours sparked. I was the one who should have gone into the smoke and never come out. Not him.”
“Stop.” Her hands are fists now, small and furious and shaking. “Don’t you dare rewrite this. My father made a choice.”
“Because my house put him in it.”
“Because he loved me,” she snaps. “Because that’s what he would have done for anyone on that street. Because he was a good man and you are not allowed to turn his sacrifice into your penance.”
My breath leaves hard. “What else would you call it?”
“Grief,” she says. “And you aren’t the only one who carries it.”
I look at her. Really look. The lines she hides in daylight are there, faint and real: the years she wore a brave face for other people’s emergencies while her own sat quietly in the back row and waited for her to sit down with it. The reason she learned to count breaths and take pulses and talk panic out of bodies. The reason she left.
“I didn’t send the letters,” I say, slower, “because every one of them sounded like a man asking you to come back to the fire. And I didn’t deserve to ask that.”
She stares at me like I’m a blaze she’s deciding to walk into anyway.
“How many letters,” she says, voice thin. “If I asked you for a number.”
I think about the box. The weight of it. The different handwriting because ten years changes even that. The envelopes with stamps that never saw a postmark.
“Hundreds,” I say. “Too many.”
Her lips part. She’s breathing fast again. She presses one palm to the cabinet beside me, like she needs to hold herself up or hold me in place, I can’t tell which.
“What did they say?” she asks.
“Everything.” The word lands heavy.
“Be specific.”
I let my head tip back to the metal behind me. It’s cold; it helps. I close my eyes, then open them because I want to watch her face when I cut myself open.
“I told you about the first morning you weren’t across the street when the bus went by and how I pretended I didn’t look for you every turn,” I say. “I told you I found your hair tie in the pocket of my jacket and carried it for a year like an idiot. I told you about the day the framing went up on the new house and my hands shook so bad I had to sit in the truck and breathe into my own shirt like a fool. I told you about the kid we pulled out of a wreck on Juniper and how I said your name in the dark between sirens because I didn’t know where else to put it. I told you about holidays when the town lit the tree and I looked for your face and about nights I dreamed the door opened and you were standing there asking if we still had pie.”
Her hand presses harder into the cabinet. Color slides up her throat.