Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Jack
Iwasn't thinking about where I was going.
The bike just went and I let it, the cold coming through my jacket, the road dark and empty at this hour.
I took a corner too fast somewhere on the edge of town and felt the back wheel slip and didn't do anything about it, just held on and let the bike find its own way back.
The cold was good. It was the only thing cutting through the whiskey, the only thing keeping me on the road.
I didn't deserve it.
Moments later, a car flashed its lights at me from the other direction and I realized I hadn't turned my headlight on. I turned it on then and kept riding. I didn’t know where I was going until I did.
Cassie’s.
I just ended up there, the way I always did when things got bad enough.
My sister had gotten out the way I never quite managed—without fanfare, one decision at a time, until one day she was just gone from that life and into a different one.
She'd worked two jobs through community college, transferred to a four-year program, graduated with a degree in social work that my father had called useless and she'd called none of his business.
She had a small house now, a job she believed in, a life that was quiet in a way our childhood never was.
She'd done it without making a big deal of it, without looking back, without ever once suggesting I should do the same.
That was the thing about Cassie. She never pushed.
She just showed you it was possible and let you figure out the rest.
I pulled up outside her house just before midnight.
Her porch light was on, as always. Cassie left it on the way other people left the coffee on, out of habit, out of some ambient belief that someone might need it. I'd never told her how many times I'd been grateful for that light.
I cut the engine and sat there for a moment. The house was quiet. A light on in the kitchen, curtains drawn.
I knocked.
It took a minute. Then footsteps, the door opened, and Cassie stood there in sweats with her hair down, squinting against the porch light.
She took one look at me and understood.
"Oh, Jack."
She stepped aside and I walked in.
The house was warm. I stood in the hallway like I didn't know what rooms were for while Cassie moved past me and into the kitchen.
The tap ran and the coffee maker gurgled to life.
I followed her in and sat down at the table, staring at nothing while she moved around quietly—mugs, sugar, a plate of chocolate cookies she set between us without comment. The kind of thing she just did.
She sat down after pouring the coffee, and looked at me for the first time since I'd come in.
"Okay," she said. "Whenever you're ready."
I wrapped one hand around the mug. The coffee was too hot but I held it anyway, and under the table my other hand found the velvet box in my jacket pocket without thinking, thumb moving across it once before I made myself stop.
"Maddie got into Hopkins," I said.
Cassie's face opened up with a real, unguarded smile. She couldn't have helped even if she'd tried. "Johns Hopkins?" Then she saw my face, and the smile didn't disappear so much as it went somewhere quiet. "Jack. That's incredible. That's exactly what she's been working for."
"I know."
She looked at me and I looked at the coffee.
"So why are you sitting in my kitchen at midnight looking like someone died?"
I didn't answer. How could I?
"You were going to propose." She'd known about the ring, of course. She was the one who'd told me to take it in the first place. "What happened?"
"I went to get Maddie from work."
"And?"
"I didn't go in."
Something moved across her face then. It wasn’t pain, but something close to it.
She understood what that meant, I think.
Jack Henley standing outside Rosie's with the ring in his pocket and his nerve gone.
She'd have seen the whole thing clearly, the way she always did. She let it pass without comment.
Cassie had always done that. Sat with things before she spoke, let the silence do some of the work. When we were kids it had driven me mad. Right now I was grateful for it.
"Did something happen tonight?" she said finally.
"Yeah."
"Something you can't take back?"
I didn't answer and she didn't push. She just picked up her mug and we sat there with our coffee going cold, and after a while she reached across the table and put her hands over mine.
Just like when we were kids and our father had been at his worst and there was nothing to do but wait for it to pass.
She'd done it then without thinking, same as now.
Just closed the distance and held on, like that was the only thing that made sense.
"You went to Dad's today," she said. "For the ring."
"Yeah." That was all I could say, but it was enough. Cassie would know.
"Jack." She squeezed my hands once. "I've known you your whole life.
I know what that house does to you. Whatever you did tonight—" She stopped and shook her head.
"You're a good man, Jack. I know you don't believe that right now.
But you're not him. You never were. Whatever you're telling yourself tonight, it's not the truth. "
I wanted to believe her. Some part of me always wanted to believe her.
She stayed like that a moment longer, hands over mine, not saying anything else. Then she let go and stood.
"I'll make up the couch."
She said it like morning would make any of this easier to look at.
I didn't tell her she was wrong. This would never feel easier.
But I was too tired and too drunk and too far gone into whatever I'd made of this night to argue with the one person who'd never once stopped believing I was worth the trouble.
I didn't deserve that either.
But I took the couch.