32. Jett #2
"That's all of it," I said. "Every entity, every account, the whole map of the thing I've been hiding since before you knew my name.
Eight years of it. It's yours now. Run it, sit on it, put my whole name on a national cover, burn it in the sink.
I don't care. I genuinely do not care which one you pick, because it was never mine to control and I controlled it anyway, in the dark, and I'm giving it back.
" I made myself keep my hands at my sides and not reach for her, because reaching for her would have been asking for something.
"The entities are unsealed. As of an hour ago.
Everything you pulled last month, you can pull again.
The money's verifiable. The piece stands up.
Marchetti can run it national, your name on it, New York, all of it.
I didn't fix it for you. I just stopped breaking it. "
She looked at the envelope. She did not touch it.
"Why," she said.
And here was the part I could not control. The part there was no architecture for. The part the eighteen-year-old on the bus had spent half a life making sure I'd never have to say to anyone out loud on a terrace in the daylight.
"Because Stone told me I didn't protect you.
He said I protected the bus." My voice did a thing it had never done in that family of careful voices.
It went, for a second, all the way unsteady, and I let it.
"I read your piece again. The end of it.
The part I ran from. You wrote that I'd rather disappear than be known, and that the distance is the only thing I've ever really loved, because the distance is the only thing that never left me.
" I made myself look at her. Looking at her was the hardest physical thing I'd done since I was a kid getting hit.
"You were right. You were right four days before I proved it.
And I've been standing in a safe empty house for two days figuring out that the distance never protected me either.
It just kept me alone. I called it freedom for eight years because nobody ever stayed long enough to teach me the other word. "
"Jett."
"I'm not asking you to take me back." I said it fast, because it was true and because I needed her to have it before anything else, the way you put the load-bearing sentence first. "That's a thing you get to decide with no pressure from me.
No gesture. No grand anything, because grand gestures are just control with the lights on, and I'm done managing you.
I came to give you your choices back. The father one.
The career one. And the last one." I picked the envelope back up, just for a second, and set it down again closer to her, the smallest distance, the one I had left to give.
"Write the true one. All of it. The money.
The church town. The kid in the suit. My name, your name, the whole thing, the worst of me, on a cover, on a newsstand two hours from a town that threw me out.
I'd rather every stranger in America see me exactly the way you saw me than be the only thing my own distance ever managed to protect.
You don't need my permission. But you've got it, and I drove down here without my armor on to hand it to you in person, because the one thing I can do, the only thing I've got left that I never gave anybody, is let you watch me do it. "
She was crying. Not the operational kind. She let me see it, which from Dani was the loudest thing.
She still did not touch the envelope.
"I don't know if I forgive you," she said. "I don't know that today."
"I know."
"You don't get to drive down here and be brave one time and have that be the whole thing. That's not how it works. You hid for eight years. You don't get un-hidden in an afternoon."
"I know that too." And here, God help me, the smallest piece of the actual me came back, the loud one, the one she'd written about, surfacing through the wreckage like a guy coming up for air.
"But I'm planning on being extremely findable for a very long time, so. You'll have a lot of chances to check."
She almost laughed. She caught it. She killed it, the exact way I'd killed mine in this same standoff five weeks and a lifetime ago, and the catching was not a no.
"There's a game tonight," I said. "Seven o'clock.
I'm going to be the most visible man in that building.
No distance. Nowhere to hide, on purpose.
" I stepped back, toward the door, giving her the whole terrace, the whole choice, the whole open sky.
"I'm not going to look for you in the stands.
I'm not going to manage it. But if a woman who decided to stop hiding wanted to find a man who finally did the same, that's where he'll be.
All the way out in the open. Easiest man in Nevada to find. "
I left the envelope on the table.
I did not get an answer, and I did not ask for one.
I rode the elevator back down past her mother, who watched me go with something on her face that was not quite approval but was in the same zip code, and I walked out into the Friday afternoon a man with no armor and no plan and no idea whether the bravest thing I'd ever done was going to be enough.
And for the first time in eight years that uncertainty did not make me reach for a single wall.
I just got in the car.
Six weeks ago we'd been the best team in hockey, and a stranger wearing my number had spent November handing it back a game at a time.
The skid had a number on it now. People said the number out loud on the radio.
Tonight it ended or it didn't, and for the first time in a month I was going to find out which one from the inside of my own body instead of from behind a wall.
I had a game to play. And I was going to play it like it was mine, win or lose her, because Stone was right about that part too. It had always been mine. I'd just spent my whole life too braced to stand still in it.
Seven o'clock.
All the way out in the open.