“Look,” Callum sighed as he turned around to face him, fumbling with his keys. “I heard what you said in there, and congratulations – you finally grew some balls. But what do you want from me, exactly?”
“I promised Ally I’d talk to you. I gave her a choice – I thought it was the least I could do.”
“A choice?”
“I asked her if she wanted me to stay or go. She said she wanted me to stay.”
Callum frowned, staring down at the keys in his hand for a moment. “Right. Of course she did.”
Jack shifted his weight from one foot to the other, waiting.
“Let’s just get one thing straight,” Callum said. “You make her a promise like that, you better keep it – if you tell her you’re going to stick around and then you disappear again, I will personally hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand me?”
Jack nodded as Callum continued to eyeball him.
“Get in the car.”
Obediently, Jack did as he was told. The silence in the car was deafening and Callum didn’t seem in any hurry to break it. Jack watched another Barney’s patron walk out of the bar and up the street, staggering slightly. The temperature had dropped over the past hour and the light mist that had settled over the street gave the streetlights an eerie glow.
“I hated you for leaving,” Callum said finally. “I mean, I knew you felt responsible for what happened to her, but I never thought you’d just leave her like that. You were going to propose, Jack – then you just up and disappear, right when she needed you most? What the hell were you thinking?”
Jack stared at his hands, clenched into fists on his thighs. He thought back to that night like he had hundreds of times. “I wasn’t – thinking, that is. I was just scared. I didn’t want her to push me away so I left before she could.”
“That’s a really shitty excuse.”
“I know it’s shitty, but it’s not an excuse. It’s the truth. I was scared. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“We were all scared,” Callum said. “Do you think it was easy, watching her go through this?”
“Do you think it was easy walking away?” Jack countered, turning towards him.
“Don’t you dare do that, no one made you leave, that was your choice!”
There was no arguing with that.
“I know that saying I’m sorry won’t cut it. I can’t change what I did, but I can be here now. That’s why I asked her – I wanted to do the right thing for her, I wanted her to have a choice this time.”
Silence settled over them once again. All Jack could hear was the beating of his own heart in his ears.
“Surgery seemed to take forever,” Callum said at last. “And that whole time, I kept hoping that somehow, they’d gotten it all wrong, that they’d come out of the operating room and say whoops, sorry, made a mistake, she’s gonna be fine.”
Jack tried to breathe but if felt like his chest was in a vice.
“The next few days, the meds were pretty strong. She only came round for a few minutes at a time, they made her really groggy. Every time she opened her eyes, she asked for you. We just kept saying you were on your way. Luckily, she couldn’t stay awake long enough to question it.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack murmured, knowing full well that it wasn’t enough.
"Finally, we had to tell her what happened. We couldn’t wait for you anymore, she was getting upset and it wasn’t good for her. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. If Tom hadn’t been there with me, I don’t know if I could’ve done it. For a long time afterwards, I felt like I’d taken something from her.”
Jack glanced over at him, his heart in his mouth. “How did she take it?”
Callum seemed lost, staring out the windshield. “She cried.”
Jack’s head bowed low. His heart felt like it was being shredded.
“I think deep down, on some level, she might have known,” Callum reflected quietly. “She said she couldn’t feel her legs. We kept blaming it on the meds, stalling until we could find you. But the doc said we should tell her. The sooner she knew, the sooner she could start to accept it. She was so scared and there was nothing I could do,” he paused, swallowing noisily. “All through rehab, even months later, she still thought you’d come home. She was fighting so hard to be independent because she didn’t want you to be scared off again when you came back. Did Tom tell you that?"
"No," he whispered. “He didn’t.”
Callum huffed out a breath, shaking his head in disbelief.
“It wasn’t his fault. I told him not to.”
“So you just walked away and didn’t want to know anymore, is that it? Fresh slate? Never gave us a second thought?”
Jack tried to think of words that would explain what the last four years had been like but everything sounded trite by comparison. It didn’t matter what he had been through, only what he had put everyone else through by leaving. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?”
“I’m not going to make excuses for what I did. There’s nothing I can say that’s gonna make it sound noble or justified. But I didn’t just walk away and forget about you all either, trust me.”