I didn’t know how to say this out loud. I didn’t know how to explain it. She was the one person in the world who deserved to know, and here I was, eleven years later, sitting in the cab of my dad’s shitty old truck in a deserted nursing home parking lot, and I still couldn’t tell her my darkest secret.
I finally sighed. “I need you to listen to me, baby, because this is important.” I nodded, giving myself a moment to regroup. “I love you, Helene. I want you to know that. You’re the only person I have ever and will ever love in this lifetime. I’m so good at loving you. It’s the one thing I can safely say I will never falter at. It doesn’t mean I’ll make the right decisions, do the right things, or say the right things. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean I can make you happy. But my heart will always be in the right place with you.” Tears filled my eyes and then ran down my cheeks. My throat tightened like a vise around my words. “But this place is killing me,” my voice lurched out. I forced myself to continue. “Not because of you, not even because of our past, but … because of a mistake I made a long time ago. If I stay, I will end up hurting you. I don’t know how or what it will be, and I’ll fight against that need to destroy myself as long as I can to protect you. But … something will happen. Something will spark that unresolved nightmare in me. It will happen, and I can’t let it. I love you too much to allow my life to destroy yours. There is nothing else in the world you need to understand about me than that.”
She was nearly silent, but I could hear her crying quietly—the hitch of her breath, the shuddering sobs, the sniffing of her nose. And then she hung up. I covered my eyes, pressing on them as color erupted like fireworks, and I sat there in a stupor until the sun came up hours later.
“Never have liked her,” Shawn said as he finished screwing in a light switch plate. “That bitch is too—”
“Don’t call her that,” I snapped quickly as I pulled myself out from under the kitchen sink, still holding the jar of joint compound in my hand. “You don’t know her.” I glared up at Shawn.
“She dumped your ass like three days ago, and you don’t want me to talk shit about her?” He rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” He went back to his light switch plate. “I at least thought with all this time you been spending nailing her, she might actually convince you to stick around and stay in Hazleton,” he muttered.
I pushed up from the floor, standing at the new kitchen counter and running my hand along the smooth surface for a moment. “I wanted to be convinced by her,” I said quietly. “At times I thought I was.”
“And yet, you’re still moving on just as soon as this place is on the market, huh?”
I rested my elbows to the counter, letting my head drop to my hands. “It’s kind of complicated.” I didn’t offer anything further. In truth, it was more than complicated. My time back in Hazleton was always supposed to be a temporary thing. The timeline had nearly run its course, and it was supposed to end very soon. It was supposed to end, because I needed it to end. I needed an end to everything that had come before it.
The problem was … I’d made the mistake of venturing into Hell, touching the heat, making that warmth my home. And now I wasn’t sure I had the strength to leave and do what I knew I needed to do—what I had to do.
“She deserves better than me.” I made the comment more to myself than Shawn.
He snorted. “She tell you that?” He was sneering.
I shook my head, but I didn’t want to say anything more. It was now Tuesday mid-evening, and the why behind our breakup was still hidden from Shawn, just as it would remain, because it simply wasn’t something Shawn had any business knowing. But this conversation could easily push me into madness—a place I’d been flirting with for three days now.
I stared around the kitchen, and then I walked to the living room, looking around that room as well. It was beautiful. It was also done—aside from a few last minute items like having the dumpster towed away, cleaning up the yard and the scraps on the porch, and dusting the place down from top to bottom. Done.
Shawn walked into the living room, looking around too. “Let’s knock off. Go get a drink.”
I didn’t answer for a minute. I walked away, ignoring him, and I entered the hallway. My bedroom finally and for the first time looked like a real bedroom. The walls were smooth, the trim clean and fresh. The light fixture updated. The floors gleamed, and I followed that gleam down the hallway, peeking into the spare bedroom, the completely updated and new bathroom, and then finally down the hall into the larger master bedroom. I’d kept the paint color neutral, but not too light. It was a warm grayish tan, and the color popped against the wide white trim throughout.
I pulled my phone from my pocket as I looked out the master bedroom window toward the trees beyond. When Ross answered after the third ring, I gnawed on my thumbnail rather than speaking.
“Kane?” he finally asked.