Chapter 20 #3
Her eyes stung, and she let tears flow down her cheeks unchecked and unwiped.
His eyes teared up, too, and he let them, which was its own kind of first.
The teapot whistled, and Sunny waved Hank back to his chair. She got up, and tonight she made them tea the way they both liked it. When the timer went off on the stove and she carried the finished tea to the table, they’d both regained their composure at least a little.
“There’s a balance owing on your side too,” he said, when she sat back down.
“Do tell,” she blurted, surprised.
“You told me once you didn’t believe a word I said about doors and keys and the cages men trap themselves in. You said you’d file it pending. I’m marking that entry due.”
He reached out and his hands closed around hers considerably more gently than hers had around his.
He said, “There is a difference between locking the door to a cage and being the reason a man is in the cage. I watched you women climb a hill last week and hand seven people grace they never asked for and didn’t think they’d earned.
I also watched you stand on that hill and finally believe that grace is real. ”
He was not wrong.
Hank continued, “So take your share of it. Winston built a cage for himself, bar by bar, for ten years, with a forger’s care.
All you ever did was decline to hand him the key to escape and leave you buried in the wreckage.
You didn’t ruin him any more than I ruined her.
Write it off, Sunny. Clear that page in your ledger. ”
She’d written paid across other people’s debts all summer, for Reno, for a town, for seven children with a monster’s cheekbones. Writing it for herself took longer. Hank watched her do it, watched it move through her face like weather finally breaking as their tea sat untouched and went cold.
Hank refilled the kettle and put it back on the stove to make them new cups of tea while she worked through his logic piece by piece.
She went through it twice but could find no flaw in his logic.
She didn’t ruin Winston by preventing him from fleeing the country.
He’d already ruined himself long before that.
She’d just made sure he didn’t escape the cage he’d built around himself.
In the same way Hank wasn’t responsible for failing to heal Lorraine if she didn’t want to be healed, she wasn’t responsible for not seeing the things Winston hid from her and everyone else successfully for a decade.
The truth had always been right there in front of her.
She just hadn’t been ready to see it, yet.
She hadn’t been ready to extend a little grace to herself, until now.
Until she met a man who was honest down to his bones, who saw her all the way down to hers and still wanted her, flaws and all.
A man who loved her enough to set her free so she could be as happy as she wanted to be however and wherever that might be.
When she finally accepted that Hank was right, that she didn’t ruin Winston, relief flowed over her and through hers, a healing bath of warmth.
Finally, at long last, she forgave herself for everything she hadn’t seen in Winston that he’d been hiding from her, and for what she’d done to stop him from fleeing.
She let out a breath she’d been holding for, near as she could figure, three years.
“It’s finished,” she whispered. “Paid in full.”
Hank stood and drew her up out of the chair He folded her into him, and his arms, which had stayed at his sides through a whole summer of goodnight kisses on the porch, came around her at last.
He held on to her the way a man holds the one thing he’s decided never to let go of again. When he kissed her, it was unhurried and certain, a vow paid in advance. The kettle began to sing behind them as if it had been waiting all its life for an occasion worthy of its song.
“Stay for supper,” he said against her hair. “Go get the whole herd and bring them back here where they belong. Madi too. I’ll cook.”
“You’ll burn it.”
“I will burn it,” he agreed, “and I’ll run down to the diner and Rose will pack us a big bag of take-out food. It’ll be the best meal served in this town tonight.”
She laughed into the front of his shirt.
He walked her out through the office. At the side table by the front window he stopped, and with her hand still in his, he reached over and turned on the small lamp. Its warm light fell across the porch boards and out into the blue shadows lengthening on the porch.
“I’m leaving it lit from now on,” he said. “Not so you can find your way here anymore. Everybody this light was ever for is already home, or about to be. It’s staying lit because this house is done being dark.”
He walked her outside, and she rose up on her toes in the soft glow of the lamp and kissed him in full view of the entire street.
Behind one of those windows, Sunny would bet the whole Montenegro account that news of the town’s accountant kissing its doctor’s lights out was already moving toward Ruth Sanger at the speed of light.