Fate #2
“The past just doesn’t seem to stay where we leave it,” I said. I was thinking about that call with Lucy, the one where she told me this was true. I did not want to believe her and sometimes I hated how right she always was.
Austin looked up. “No, it doesn’t. I wish it did.”
“I went to the graveyard the other night. I went to go see my dad… and my mom, I guess I just went to see my parents. I was sitting there on the ground, and I was so angry at Jax.” I watched his face for the flicker I knew would come.
“I went there to be sad about my dad and somehow I ended up doing this whole math problem about everything he took from me.”
“That tracks,” Austin said carefully. “Doesn’t it always go there eventually? I don’t know, sometimes it feels like Jax was the catalyst. What he did… it set everything in motion.”
“I thought it would stop,” I said. “I thought three years of therapy meant I had gotten past needing to drag him into every single hard thing that happens to me. But I sat there with a bottle of my dad’s vodka and all I could think about was him. Not Tom. Not my mom. Him.”
Austin did not say anything right away. He turned his coffee mug a slow half-circle on the counter.
“I think about him, too, sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, the old reflex.
“Don’t,” Austin said, sharp enough that I knew he meant it. “He took something from all of us. He took the most from you. Of course, you’re angry. Of course you’re angry, Seren.”
“Do you think it stops?” I asked. “I thought I was in the after but now I realize I never really made it there.”
“I don’t know,” Austin said. I waited. I knew from the look in his eyes that he had more to say.
“Sometimes you talk about how Zane was the first person to see the real you. And not in that bullshit way that people usually mean it. Not like he saw the good, shiny version of you that you keep hidden. Like… he saw all of it, the good parts. The bad parts. Sorry to say, but back then you had a lot of bad parts. But he saw them all and it didn’t matter.
You were still worth something. Even with all the bad parts, you were still worth loving. ”
I was still as Austin spoke, running my eyes across the way his face had gone somber. “Yeah,” I agreed because I think he was looking for that.
“That’s how I feel about you,” he told me, a flat smile crossing his face. “Blair did that too, of course. But you were the first person to see how fucked up I was and choose to love me anyway. And you are the first person’s love that I decided to be worthy of.”
“You are worthy of love,” I reminded him. “Especially mine.”
“Well, part of being worthy of it is protecting you. Then, your dad sits across from me, signs a stack of papers like everything is fine, calls me Saturday morning to tell me he’s stepping back, and I told him that was great.
” His voice cracked slightly on great. “I congratulated him. Same as I congratulated him on the contracts. I missed it completely. Same as I missed Jax.”
“I know how to read people. That was my deal. My version of your deal with time. I was going to see things. I was going to catch them early enough to matter.” He set the unlit cigarette flat against his knee.
“I didn’t catch this before it hurt you, and I hate that.
I failed.” Austin finally took a steady breath and looked at me.
“That’s not fair to anyone,” I told him. “You and Zane… you both have to stop this. You did not fail. And you especially did not fail me. You never have.”
“I failed you twice,” he said.
“You didn’t fail,” I said again, and I let it come out hard, because soft wasn’t going to reach him.
“You didn’t fail me with Jax because Jax built an entire life designed to be missed.
He fooled everyone. He fooled me, for longer than I want to admit.
He fooled himself, Austin. And you didn’t fail me with my dad because my dad spent eight months being deliberately, professionally invisible about it.
He had a lawyer. He had a system. He was better at hiding than you were ever going to be at catching. This wasn’t your job.”
Austin’s eyes were wet. He did not wipe them. He let out a breath that shook a little on the way out. “I don’t know how to stop feeling like it was my job,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But you could not have protected me from this. Even if you knew. Even if you realized. He still would have died. This pain would still be here. This was inevitable.”
He reached across the counter and gripped my hand, hard, the way he did everything, and we sat there for a minute not saying anything else, because some things did not need more words put on them.
The front door opened minutes later. “Hello? Seren? Austin texted me to come over, said it was important—” Blair’s voice trailed into the kitchen ahead of her, light and easy, completely unprepared for what she was walking into.
She stopped in the doorway. She looked between us, the letter on the counter, the weight in the room that did not need explaining once you were standing inside it.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Austin stood up. He did not say anything clever, did not soften it the way I half-expected him to. He just picked up the letter, walked it over to her, and put it in her hands.
“It’s from Henry,” he said. “Zane found it last night. There’s a part about you.”
Blair’s face went through several things very quickly. Confusion. Then something sharper. She looked down at the pages, and I watched her recognize his handwriting before she had even found the part that was hers, the way you recognize a voice before you understand the words.
“Can I—” She looked up at Austin, then at me. “Can I sit?”
“Of course,” I said.
She sat down on the stool I had been on, and Austin and I gave her room, moving to lean against the counter, and she read it.
Her eyes moved fast at first and then slowed when she reached her own name.
I watched her go very still, the same stillness I had felt myself last night, the paralysis of seeing your own name in a dead person’s last words.
She read it twice. I could tell because her eyes went back up the page once she reached the end. When she finally looked up, her eyes were wet, but she was not crying the way I expected. She looked almost relieved.
“He thought about that summer,” she said softly.
“I always wondered if he even remembered it. We were so young. I thought maybe it didn’t matter to him the way it mattered to me.
” She pressed the letter flat against her chest, the same gesture I had made with the photograph I found, like the act of holding something to your heart was simply what people did when words ran out. “He remembered.”
“He did,” Austin said.
“Fate had other plans,” she read again, quietly, the words clearly doing something to her that none of us could follow from the outside. “He believed in it too. I didn’t know that.”