Chapter 34 RONAN
Ronan
I’ve always been good at one thing above the rest: telling myself a hard truth until it can’t touch me.
I do it the whole way home. She’s cleared. That was the objective, the objective is met, and a man who gets what he came for doesn’t get to be destroyed on the drive back.
She had something she couldn’t carry and she carried it alone rather than let me near it. I ran it once already, in the back of that room, and it holds. That’s all I need to know.
That was the last of the work I’ll do for her. I owed her that much, for the summer, for the leg, for keeping me alive whether I earned it or not. Debt paid. We’re square.
I don’t look too hard at why square feels like this.
Nobody’s home when I pull in. Mrs. Vale’s gone for the day, and I leave the lights off. I take the stairs I couldn’t climb three months ago without a thought for the leg.
The jacket goes over the back of the chair. I’m pulling the tie loose when I see it on the nightstand.
The quarter is sitting exactly where it’s sat for weeks. Next to the clock, right where I set it down the morning after the first night I had her in that bed. I put it there and I never picked it back up. For a while there I forgot it was even mine.
I pick it up now.
It slots into my fingers like it never left, and my thumb starts it moving across my knuckles before I’ve decided a single thing. Over, and over, and over. Twenty-one years of muscle memory. The place is quiet enough that I can hear the metal turn.
That’s the man I was before her. Still in here the whole time.
I roll my sleeves and carry the coin back downstairs and pour myself a scotch. It’s one in the afternoon. I’ve just spent the morning saving the career of a woman who’s leaving. If this isn’t the hour for it, there isn’t one.
I take the bottle and the glass out to the terrace and sit, pulling the tie the rest of the way off and setting it on the table beside me.
The sky’s gone dark over the water, a storm stacked up out there that hasn’t decided to break. I set the open bottle beside me and look out at the ocean I bought so that nobody could ever reach me.
She’ll go back to Portland. Of course she will.
Her whole life is there, forty minutes down the coast. The apartment, the license, the trauma floor where she’s the best they’ve got.
Forty minutes. What was ever up here for her?
A patient. A contract with a date on it.
Eight weeks on the edge of nowhere with a hard man who couldn’t get himself down his own beach stairs.
That was the arrangement. It was always the arrangement. I’m the only one who forgot.
The quarter turns over my knuckles. I let it.
I built an entire life on one rule. Never need anyone, because the day you need them is the day you hand them the power to walk out.
I broke it this summer. In a kitchen, at a fire, on a boat, in that bed at the top of the stairs.
I let a woman all the way in. I kissed her like I meant it, which I hadn’t done in years, because that was the one thing I never gave anyone, and I gave it to her without noticing I’d stopped guarding it.
She knelt on my study floor and stayed with me while my body tried to quit, and I let myself believe that was the same as her staying.
And the first time it counted, the first time she had something too heavy to carry, she didn’t hand me one ounce of it. She drove off alone and lied to my face so I’d never know.
Lesson re-learned. I’m alive, she’s cleared, and I’ve remembered the one thing I should never have let myself forget.
I’m done.
I say it out loud, to the water and the coming rain. “I’m done.”
Then I drink. The whole glass. I pour another.
Every room behind me is empty.
I was better before her.
I take another drink.
Say it enough times, and I’ll believe it.