20. Harry
— ? —
Harry
I’ve looked at Avery a thousand times in my life.
When we were kids at the children’s home, I looked at her and saw the little girl who cried herself to sleep every night because her parents were dead and nobody was coming to save her.
I looked at her at my wedding and saw my oldest friend, the only person who knew where I came from, and the only connection I had to the boy I used to be.
I looked at her every time Jules complained and saw a woman who was difficult and clingy, but ultimately harmless. I saw a childhood wound that never healed right, and someone who needed patience and understanding, not punishment.
I don’t know who the fuck I’m looking at now.
“Harry.” Avery spins around, and her whole demeanor shifts. The hysteria softens into pleading, and she looks fragile again. “Harry, I didn’t… I was just… Jules and I were talking, and I got upset, and I said things I didn’t mean.”
“I heard what you said.”
My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It’s flat and cold, the voice I use on people who are about to lose everything and don’t know it yet.
“No. You don’t understand. I was upset. She was accusing me of things, making me feel…”
“I only locked the door.”
Avery goes still.
“That’s what you said.” I step onto the porch. “Standing in front of my wife. ‘I only locked the door.’”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You locked my wife in a bathroom while the building was on fire.”
“How was I supposed to know the place would catch fire?”
“You locked the door and walked away.”
“I thought she’d get out! I thought someone would find her! I just wanted her to miss the meeting.”
“She almost died.”
The words come out quiet and final.
Avery flinches.
Jules is silent in the doorway. I can feel her there, solid and steady, and I want to turn around and look at her and make sure she’s all right. But I can’t take my eyes off Avery, because if I look away, I might not finish this.
I step between them and put myself in front of my wife.
“You knew she was in there,” I say. “The fire alarm went off, and you knew exactly where she was, and you told me she was already outside.”
“I thought I saw…”
“Bullshit.”
Her mouth snaps shut.
I’ve never talked to her like that, not once in twenty years. Even when she fucked up, even when she pushed too far, I softened it. I made excuses and let her off easy because I couldn’t stand to see her cry.
She’s crying now, and I feel nothing.
“You told me you saw her leaving through the east exit,” I say. “I asked you where my wife was, and you looked me in the eye, and you lied.”
“I panicked. I was confused. There was smoke, and people were running.”
“You stood outside with me and watched me search for her. You watched me call her over and over. You kept pulling at my arm and telling me she was fine.”
“I thought she was! I didn’t know…”
“She called me eleven times.” My voice is steady and calm, and I don’t recognize it.
“While she was trapped in that bathroom with smoke coming through the vent, she called me eleven times. And I never heard it, because my phone was two floors below her and I was standing on the street with you, believing your lie.”
Avery’s face crumples.
“Harry, please. You have to understand. I was scared. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but I never meant for her to get hurt. You know me. You know I would never…”
“I believed her.”
She stops.
“The night she woke up in the hospital,” I say. “She could barely talk. Her voice was almost gone from the smoke. She told me you locked her in, and I believed her.”
“Because she’s got you wrapped around her finger.”
“Because she’s never lied to me. Not once in three years.”
Avery’s chin wobbles. “That’s not…”
“I didn’t need proof. I didn’t need a confession. I believed my wife the moment she told me, because unlike you, she has never given me a reason not to. Hearing you say it changes nothing, except that I never have to look at you again.”
“I’ve never lied to you either!”
“You’ve been lying to me for three years.
” I shake my head. “The man in the garage, who I’m guessing never existed.
The reservation you changed. My phone, which you silenced.
The photos you sent to her phone. The lilies you sent to her hospital room.
And two years of smaller things before that, every one of which my wife told me about.
” I watch her face and see each one land, and I see her realize that I know.
“You’ve been sabotaging my marriage from the beginning, and I was too fucking blind to see it. ”
“I was protecting you!”
“You were protecting yourself.”
“She’s not good enough for you! She doesn’t understand you, not like I do. She doesn’t know what it was like, what we survived together. She just showed up after you made your money and…”
“I asked her to dinner for four months before she said yes. I’m the one who showed up.”
“You picked wrong!”
“No.” I step closer, and she steps back. “For the first time in my life, I picked someone who doesn’t need me to save her. She sees me as a partner, not a rescuer. She pushes back when I’m wrong instead of telling me what I want to hear.”
“I’ve always told you the truth!”
“You’ve told me what would keep me close. That’s not the same thing.”
Avery stares at me. Her face is blotchy and red, with mascara streaking down her cheeks, and she looks like a stranger.
Maybe she’s always been a stranger, and I just didn’t want to see it.
“We’re done,” I say.
“You already fired me. What else can you…”
“I’m not talking about the fucking job. I’m talking about me. You don’t call me. You don’t come to this house. You don’t go crying to Hazel and ask her to get me on the phone. It’s over, Avery, all of it.”
“Harry.”
“You are not my sister. You are not my family.” I hold her gaze. “You are someone I felt sorry for. And my pity almost cost me the only person in this world I can’t live without.”
Her breath hitches, and the tears come harder.
“You gave up a family for me,” she whispers. “When we were kids. That couple wanted to adopt you, and you said no because of me. You stayed for me.”
She’s throwing the adoption at me.
“I was twelve and you were nine,” I say, “and you cried in my room until I’d have done anything to make it stop.”
“You stayed for me.”
“I was a child, Avery. I made a child’s decision because a nine year old girl was sobbing and I didn’t know what else to do.
” I shake my head. “I’ve been paying for that decision for twenty years.
I’ve been looking out for you since I was ten years old, and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that made you my responsibility forever. It doesn’t. It never did.”
“You’re abandoning me.” Her voice rises. “Just like everyone else. Just like your own parents did. They left you at a police station like garbage, and now you’re doing the same thing to me.”
“Don’t.”
The word comes out hard enough to make her flinch.
“Don’t you dare use that,” I say. “Don’t you dare throw my parents at me.
I have spent twenty years trying to make up for a thing that was never my fault, and you have used that guilt to keep me close.
Every time I tried to pull away, every time I tried to have a life that didn’t revolve around you, you reminded me that I was all you had, and that I couldn’t leave you like everyone else did. ”
“Because it’s true!”
“It’s manipulation, Avery. It always has been.”
She shakes her head frantically. “I love you. I’ve loved you my whole life. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done because I love you.”
“You locked my wife in a burning building.”
That stops her.
“You almost killed the woman I love,” I say, “and now you’re standing on my porch telling me it’s because you love me. That’s not love. I don’t know what the fuck that is, but it’s not love.”
“Harry, please.” She’s sobbing now, real sobs, ugly and raw. “Please. You’re all I have. You’re the only person who’s ever cared about me. Without you I have nothing. I have no one. Please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me alone.”
This is the button she’s been pushing for twenty years.
I wait for the guilt. I wait for the familiar weight of it to settle on my shoulders and make me soften and make me cave.
It doesn’t come.
I look at her crying on my porch, and all I feel is tired.
“There is no us, Avery,” I say. “There never was, not the way you wanted, and there never will be.”
She stares at me through her tears.
“You need to leave.”
“Harry.”
“Now.”
She opens her mouth and closes it. Then the desperation in her face hardens and turns bitter.
“You’ll regret this,” she says. “When she leaves you, and she will, Harry, because you’re not the man she thinks you are…”
My wife’s voice cuts through from behind me, calm and steady.
“You’re older than I am,” Jules says. “It’s time you started acting like an adult.”
Avery’s face twists. For a second I think she’s going to scream, or do anything that would make this uglier than it already is.
She doesn’t. She just turns around and walks back to her car, gets in, and slams the door.
The guard from the gate is already at the end of the driveway.
I don’t remember telling him to come up, but I must have, at some point between the gate’s call and the moment I got out of my car.
He walks back down behind her sedan and lets her out.
The gate opens, she drives through, and it closes behind her.
I walk Jules back inside and shut the front door. Then I stand there with both hands braced against it, breathing hard.
Twenty years of my life have just driven out of my gate, and what I feel is the cold certainty that I should have done this a long time ago.
“Harry.”
Jules’ voice is soft and careful.
I don’t turn around yet, because I don’t know what she’ll see if I do.
“Harry. Look at me.”
I turn around.
She’s standing there in her leggings and her cardigan, balanced on her crutches, with her dark hair loose around her shoulders. She doesn’t look triumphant and she doesn’t look angry. She just looks at me as if she’s trying to figure out what I need.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“You’re asking me if I’m okay.” The laugh that comes out of me sounds wrong. “You almost died because of her, and you’re asking…”
“That was two months ago. You just lost your oldest friend.”
“She wasn’t my friend.”
“She was your family. For a long time.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
I cross to her before I can think about it. My hands find her arms, her shoulders, her face, checking that she’s all right and that Avery didn’t touch her.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Harry. I’m fine.”
I can’t stop. My hands keep moving over every inch of her I can reach.
She catches my hands and holds them still.
“I’m fine,” she repeats. “She didn’t touch me. She just talked.”
“I should have been here.”
“You were.”
“Not soon enough.”
“You heard her. That’s the part that mattered.”
I look at the dark eyes that have seen more of me than anyone else in the world, and the stubborn set of her jaw, and I think about her standing in her own doorway on crutches without flinching.
She pulls me down by my shirt and kisses me.
It’s not gentle and it’s not tentative. She’s staking a claim, and I let her take whatever she needs.