Chapter 72 I’m Not Going Anywhere — Ii
“I’ve watched you carry it,” I said. “All summer. I watched you make three separate scenes safe and then run from every one of them so nobody could get close enough to say thank you. I wouldn’t wish that job on anyone — being the one the whole world leans on.
It would flatten a stronger person than me, and I’ve done a small version of it, and it nearly did.
So I’m not asking you to be the calm one for the whole of Halford.
I mean that. You’re not the emergency number.
You never have to be the emergency number.
” I picked the next words like I pick my footing on a scene, one careful placement at a time, because they were the ones that mattered.
“I’m asking you to stop hiding from the two or three of us who would love the shaking hands and everything underneath them.
That’s a smaller job. That’s not the fuse.
That’s just — letting Ren, and that kid upstairs, and me.
Letting us see you scared, right here, in this kitchen, and stay anyway.
You don’t have to be steady for us. You can fall apart in this room every single day of the week, twice on Sundays, and we will still be here when you’re done. ”
“You can’t promise that,” she said, but her voice had cracked, the terrible flatness breaking up into something with feeling in it again, which was better, which was her coming back into her own body from wherever she’d gone.
“No,” I agreed. “That’s the whole deal. That’s the honest version.
I can’t promise nothing ever goes wrong again.
Nobody can, and if I stood here and told you I could, you’d know I was lying, and you’d be right to run, and I’d help you pack.
Bad things are going to happen. You might even be too slow one day.
That’s the actual world, and I’d be a fool to sell you a different one.
” I got up off the floor, slow, and sat next to her on the bed, careful to leave six inches of open space between us, so the choice of closing it stayed hers.
“Here is the only thing I can promise you, and I can promise it completely. Whatever goes wrong, from here on out — you won’t be standing over it alone anymore.
That’s the thing that broke you the first time.
You had one team, and you carried all of them by yourself, and when it broke, it broke on you alone.
You’ve got a bigger team now. And this one carries back. ”
She was quiet a long while. Down through the floorboards, Theo laughed at something on a screen, loud and unbothered, alive, home.
I want to say something about myself here, because I’d come up those stairs to save her, and it turned out I was doing the other thing at the same time.
I came to this county three years ago and quietly decided, without any drama about it, that my life was going to be the work and that would be enough, and I meant it, the enough part, or I thought I did.
I’d stopped expecting anything with my own name on it.
And then I met a woman who could hold her hands dead steady over a live device and couldn’t open her own mail without a running start, and somewhere in a bad hot summer I started wanting a life again — the specific kind, the kind with a particular person in it — and I’d been too careful, too self-contained, too used to going without, to ever say it out loud.
Sitting on her bed with a packed bag between us turned out to be me choosing, too.
Not to want less, which I’d spent three years training myself into.
To want this. Out loud. At the full risk of the taillights.
“Zip it up, or don’t,” I said. “I’ll be at Fran’s either way, drinking bad coffee, and I’ll survive it.
I’m not chasing you and this isn’t a trap.
But I’m not going anywhere, Birdie. That’s not a threat.
It’s just true, the way a burn pattern’s true.
I found the one thing I’ve wanted in years, and it turned out to be you, with the shaking hands, all of it, and I would rather have you scared and here than calm and gone, every day, forever, and it isn’t close. ”
She reached over, very slowly, and zipped the bag shut.
Then she picked it up off the bed and set it down on the floor, empty side turned toward me, and unzipped it again, and lifted out the Bronze Star, and held it flat in her open palm where I could see it — which I understood was the answer, and the single bravest thing I’d watched her do all year, harder than the device in the dark, because there was nothing in this room to render safe except herself.