Chapter 25
Jason
Rowan offered to leave.
I follow her out to the living room where we set her time capsule on the shelf beside a framed photo of my dad with his parents and me barely coming up to his hip. Rowan teases me about calling this “our” escape, like I hoped she would. I tease back, working to make her smile.
Wanting to ease things for her. Be her escape.
Only something different is taking root in my head. The idea that maybe this woman needed an escape, a real one… from well before we ever met.
I rub a hand over my chest, watching as she pokes at a log.
Her eyes cut my way. “You can ask. Whatever it is.”
“Marsha. Your mom.” I take the poker and lean it against the hearth then draw her back to the couch with me, pulling her into my lap. “What did she care if we were friends? Dad had already married her. You’d think us getting along would have been the goal.”
I’m leaning into the corner of the couch, Rowan’s head resting against my shoulder, my arms supporting her back on one side and draped over her knee on the other.
She sighs, her fingers playing idly with the button on my shirt. “My mom. She’s very… protective of her security. She doesn’t handle perceived threats well.”
“And you and I being friends would have been a threat?”
“You and I would have looked like an alliance. Two against one, at least in her mind. And then what if Ed had been more connected to his son than to his new wife?” She gives me the smallest shake of her head. “She doesn’t see things the way most people do.”
“I don’t understand how someone thinks that way. My dad loved her. At least back then. And hell, he stayed with her to the end, despite all the ways she revealed herself to be something other than the woman he first met.”
Rowan bites her lip, seemingly debating a response with herself. “It isn’t actually about love with my mother.”
I’ve known this for a long time. Suspected it even longer. But never, in a million years, would I have expected Rowan to be the one to confirm it.
“Money.”
“Yes, obviously. But… Okay, it’s about a lot of things. Money is a big one. But it’s also about something more than that.”
The only thing I can imagine meaning more to Marsha than her bank account is Rowan.
Marsha wasn’t the best mom, or even a good one. But she’s still a mom.
“Providing for you.” It’s the one thing I could understand.
I don’t know what to make of that stunned look on Rowan’s face, like she’s never even considered it.
And worse, once she has, the hollow laugh that follows. “That would have been nice. But, Jason. That’s not how she’s built.”
Not how she’s built?
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have grown up with a person like Marsha. I’ve always wanted to believe that as shitty as she was to me, as thoughtless as she was toward my dad, that part of that behavior was based around prioritizing her daughter’s needs. Protecting her.
But what if that’s not—
I look at the woman in my arms, reminding myself she isn’t really mine even as I pull her closer. Hold her tighter.
I think about what she said about that night she was lost in the storm when she was seven.
The night I found her stranded in the rain after a baseball game three towns away from her home.
The way she’s told me that if she got in her mother’s way… it would have been “bad” for her.
Christ, the look of fear in her eyes when Marsha called a few days ago.
“Jason—” She twists a little in my hold, her hand resting against my chest. “Your heart is pounding.”
I swallow past the dread rising in my throat. “The night we met. When I came back to the baseball field for my phone and found you there.”
She blinks, and something guarded flickers in her eyes… then slowly dissipates. “What about that night?”
“Where was Marsha?” She told me her mom was stuck at work.
That the whole night had been a series of unfortunate events.
She joked and laughed… even as she’d shivered and gotten into a fucking stranger’s car because she didn’t have a single other option.
“Why didn’t she pick you up when she knew you didn’t have a phone or a ride or even shelter from the rain? ”
Marsha knew how scared she was of storms.
For a minute, she just stares into my eyes, and I don’t think she thinks she’s going to tell me.
But then, quietly, “A date. She was on a date. I couldn’t be at the apartment in case she needed to bring him back there. And we didn’t have the money for me to have a phone after things hadn’t… worked out with her last… solution.”
Christ, there’s something about the careful way she lays each word out. Something that has the hair on the back of my neck standing up and that thing inside me that’s more primitive than man starting to growl. “How didn’t things work out?”
“He didn’t like that I was there. Didn’t want a kid around.
It wasn’t the first time. So we left. She was furious.
At me. At him. At the world for being so unfair.
And then she was looking for the next solution.
And I was just trying to stay out of her way.
But it wasn’t as easy for her as it had been when she was ten years younger.
And that night… before the game… she was…
different. In this kind of scary, calm way that she had when she was really mad at you.
She’d been mad like that before. So when she didn’t pick me up after the game…
I wasn’t as surprised as I’d been the first time. ”
The first time. “When you were seven?”
Her lips part, whatever denial or defense she was about to give lost when she closes them and looks away.
That primitive thing starts thrashing against the cage I keep it in. It wants to flip tables and smash chairs, but mostly it wants to pull Rowan closer. Wrap itself around her and protect her in all the ways she hasn’t been protected before.
How scared and alone had she felt?
What had her life been like with no one putting her first?
“I wish you’d told me about her,” I say now, my hand on her face. “Not because I think you should have warned us. But because I would have protected you. I would have taken you with me, Rowan. Whatever we were. Friends, something else, nothing at all… You deserved someone protecting you.”
The next hours pass quietly. We sit together on the too-small loveseat that somehow, with Rowan tucked against my side and her legs over mine, suddenly doesn’t feel too small at all.
We listen to the rain and the crackling fire, watching each log burn down and then occasionally feeding in another. She confesses that she’s never told anyone about her mother. Not even Jill.
I ask about her life before she came into mine, and it’s so very different from the glossed-over rendition I heard in those first few dinners almost ten years ago.
She asks me about my mother and what it was like growing up without her.
We talk about my dad and about Portland.
About the hospital and Jill but not the ex.
We talk about my grandparents and things we’ve talked about before, but this time, allowing in the parts of the stories that aren’t quite so light or funny.
The parts that reveal things it’s sometimes hard to trust people with.
The afternoon shifts toward evening, and the lingering rain turns to a drizzle and then a light mist. Rowan pulls me into the kitchen, and we make a simple dinner by candlelight with the ingredients that haven’t been lost to the blackout.
When we’re mostly through eating, I notice that she’s pulled the list closer, and she’s tracing her fingertip over the page.
“What are you looking at?” I ask, pushing my plate away and setting my napkin aside.
I move in partially behind her, so one side of my chest overlaps with one side of her back, and I can see over her shoulder.
She peers at me with a soft smile and taps the page where I wrote and underscored a promise I’ve tried very hard to keep… but couldn’t.
ESCAPE
“Ah, that.” I wrap one arm around her waist and settle my free hand at her hip. “Harder than it sounds, huh?”
“This isn’t Escape,” she says quietly. “Not in the feel-good, no-messy-emotional-drama way we promised each other.”
Drawing a slow breath, I pull her closer. “Maybe not. But maybe… it’s a different kind of escape. Maybe giving in to the heavy, emotional messiness of a past we almost shared, and sorting through the shards and fragments together that we haven’t been able to make sense of alone… is what we needed.”
Her hand covers mine. “I think you’re right about it being something we needed. But I don’t want to call it escape.” She huffs a soft laugh. “I liked our other definition better.”
“Okay, so what should we call it then?”
“It feels like relief to me, finally being able to talk about what happened. To apologize. To explain. I know this sounds weird, but it feels a little like freedom.”
Jesus, I can’t stand that she’s carried this alone for so long. That her mother did such a number on her that it’s taken until now for her to be able to tell someone what happened in her past. Why she was afraid.
The fact that she trusted me is beyond humbling.
I want to take her in my arms and promise her that she can tell me anything.
That I’ll be here for her. That I’ll love her.
Because yeah, I’m in love with her. A part of me has been in love with her from the night we met, and maybe it was a youthful kind of love without the depth of understanding about who someone really is or who they will become…
but after these last days together, I’ve seen who she has become. And I love her.
But telling her that now?
It wouldn’t be fair. To either of us.
I don’t want to take her hard-earned freedom or her hope of finding that easy sense of escape from her.
Her former fiancé and the plans they’d made together are barely in the rearview. She told me flat-out that the last thing she’s looking for is a relationship.
So yeah, I know what I want. But before I go after it, I’m going to give her what she asked for first. Some fun. Okay, a lot of fucking fun. A few easy days together. And then, maybe I ask her for her phone number before I ask her to move to Chicago with me.
Maybe.