Sophia #2
Except.
“Where’s Liam?” I said instead, reaching for my coffee. “Is he back tonight? And how are you, anyway — how are the feet, are they still—”
“Sophia.”
“…because last week you said the left one had basically become a…”
“Sophia Walker.” She set her bagel down.
“I have known you since we were six years old. I can hear you change lanes. You just tried to get me talking about my own ankles to keep me off you, which, frankly, is a rookie move and I’m a little insulted.
” Her face softened. “Liam’s on a case two states over.
He’s not back till tomorrow night. It’s just us, honey.
Whatever this is, it stops with me — I’m not just his wife, I’m your best friend.
Those are two different accounts and I have never once let them touch. You can say anything.”
And that was the part I’d been afraid of — not Steph, never Steph.
Liam. The image of my brother finding out, of that jaw setting, of him quietly, lovingly going to have a look at the man across the road from me, running a plate, standing too close in a driveway.
He would not mean a thing by it except love.
I still could not survive my brother’s protection on top of my own panic this week.
But she’d said it stopped with her, and Steph had never once lied to me.
So I let go of the rope.
It came out of me in no good order. The ER, weeks ago — the man they’d wheeled in, and how I’d done my job with my hands while some entirely separate part of me had stood up and paid attention to him in a way no part of me had paid attention to anyone in years.
The way he’d turned up across the road like the universe was showing off.
The coffee. The slow, patient, infuriating way he’d never once pushed.
The dinner. How easy it had been. How he’d looked at me.
How I’d sat across a table from a man and felt, for one entire evening, safe — actually safe, down-to-the-floor safe — and how I had not had a single idea what to do with that feeling because I could not remember the last time I’d had it, and how I’d lain awake all night like something hunted, and finally bolted into the dark to come and hide behind a horse.
“And I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I finished, and my voice had gone to pieces somewhere in the middle and I’d let it.
“He is the best thing that has walked toward me in my entire adult life, and my response has been to run twenty miles in the opposite direction at three in the morning. Who does that? There’s something broken in me, Steph.
There’s a part that just doesn’t — work. ”
Steph was quiet for a moment. She reached over and took my hand, the cream cheese entirely forgotten.
“You’re not broken, honey,” she said flatly, like a fact, not a comfort. “You want to know how I know? Because I married the other version of you.”
She turned my hand over in hers.
"When that man took me," she said — and I knew the days she meant before she'd finished the sentence; there was only ever the one stretch of them, years back now, when a man had walked onto the ranch and taken Steph clean out of her own life, and Liam had very nearly burned the world to the ground getting her back.
She said it the way we'd both learned to say the unsurvivable things; plainly, no flinch — "the part that nearly finished your brother wasn't the danger I was in.
It was that he hadn't seen it coming and couldn't stop it.
Because Liam decided, at fifteen, on a kitchen floor, that he would never again fail to protect someone he loved.
He couldn't save your folks. He couldn't keep you from any of it.
And he carried that for years — and then someone he loved got taken anyway, on his watch, and it confirmed the worst thing he'd ever believed about himself. "
“Steph, I didn’t — we never really talked about—”
“I know. He didn’t want it landing on you.
” She squeezed my hand. “Here’s the part I want you to have, though.
He got help, Soph. Properly. He sat in a room with a stranger once a week for the better part of a year and did the actual work, because he was so frightened of losing me that he was about three weeks from smothering me with it — checking the locks, calling twice an hour, the whole loving cage of it.
And he looked at that, and he knew it was his fear and not my keeper, and he put it down.
He didn’t stop being scared. He stopped letting the fear drive.
” She held my eyes. “That’s the bravest thing I have ever watched a person do.
And he’s your brother. It’s in the blood, that kind of brave. You’ve just never aimed it at this.”
I was crying now, properly. She let me.