“I would’ve loved and accepted any version of you, Jamie,” Holden murmurs. “You know that.”
“But how is that fair to you?” I cry. “How is it fair that every version you know of me is broken?”
“That’s just who you are…”
I shake my head, my vision blurred by my withheld tears. “It’s not who I want to be.”
His exhale fills the void between us. “That explains what? The first few months? What happened in all the years after? When did you start seeing Dean?”
I take a calming breath. And then another. “My therapist convinced me that there are people who cared about me… that I couldn’t just disappear and it wouldn’t affect anyone. So once a month for the past few years, I would go back home. I’d see Gina, visit Zeke and stay with Esme for a few days. Once, when I was there, I ran into Dean, and we started talking. He became a good friend to me, Holden. Nothing more.” I pause a beat, trying to regain my thoughts. “I’ve been doing the same version of nothing for the past few years, but I was moving forward, and that was important to me. I stopped looking at the past and all the mistakes I’d made, and I was doing well. I was slowly climbing out of the darkness, and I thought…” Oh, god. “But then…”
“Then what?” Holden urges.
I finally turn to him, seeing the same tears in his eyes that are in mine. “Then Esme died.”
Holden’s breath leaves him in a rush.
“And Dean—he was there for me. He stood beside me as they wheeled her body away, and he helped me with her funeral arrangements and… it was one night, and that night I had my first drop of alcohol since my breakdown. We both regretted it the next morning, and later that day, he drove me to the lawyer’s office where I saw you…” I smile, but it’s full of so much sadness that I can’t even comprehend how it comes across. “And that’s it. That’s where I’ve been the past five years, Holden.” I pull on the door handle and push it open. “Trying find a way to love myself the way you once loved me.”
25
Holden
There’s no answer when I knock on the RV around midday the next day, so I trail in back to the barn where I’d spotted Dad as I drove in. He’d given me a cursory nod and then asked what I was doing. I don’t usually work Saturdays, so it was odd I was here. I told him I was working in the office. Revealing the truth—that I was here to give Jamie the morning-after pill—would’ve earned me a few decent slaps upside the head.
The barn floor is covered with buckets of white roses and peonies in all different shades of pink. Such typical wedding flowers, if you ask me, but hey… it’s not my wedding. “You getting ready for tomorrow?” I ask Dad as he walks in with two more buckets. One of Maggie’s old college friends is getting married tomorrow evening, and we’re supplying the flowers at almost cost.
“Yep,” Dad says. “We’re leaving first thing, and we’ll be staying at the hotel overnight, so no raging parties, okay?”
I narrow my eyes as I lean against the workbench. “You realize I’m twenty-three, not sixteen, right? My raging party days are over.”
Dad chuckles. “We’ll be back Monday around lunch.”
“Cool.” I shove my hands in my pockets, my fingertips grazing the small box housing a single pill. “Hey, you haven’t seen Jamie, have you? I knocked on her—”
“She and Mags went to Charlotte. They should be back in a couple of hours.”
“Charlotte?”
Dad nods.
“Are they just shopping, or…?” Jamie’s never really been the shopping-for-the-sake-of-shopping type. However, she did like to wander around thrift stores for hours looking for smelly old lady clothes.
“It was the closest place Jamie could find that had an Al-Anon meeting today, so—”
“Wait,” I cut in, trying to wrap my head around what he’s saying. “Jamie had a little too much to drink last night, but she’s far from an alcoholic.”
“No, the way Maggie explains it, it’s like a support group for family and friends of alcoholics.” He pauses his task to look up at me. “Her mom was an alcoholic, right?”
“Yeah,” I breathe out, my eyes frantic as I search for answers to questions I don’t even know yet.
“You know…” Dad says. “Maggie’s really taken to that girl of yours.”
“She’s not…” I trail off because I don’t know how to finish the sentence. She’s not what? Mine? Because she was …last night… for all five minutes, and then reality came crashing down, and the entire world turned to shit. I push off the bench. “I guess I’ll just catch her when she gets back.”
“Holden,” Dad calls when my back’s already turned. “I think you should have dinner with us tonight. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while. Maybe we should just… check-in.”
I turn to him slowly. “We see each other every day.”
“No. We work together every day. Tonight, I want to have dinner with my son. Six thirty. Don’t be late.”
“Yes, sir.”
I show up at precisely six thirty, but when I enter the kitchen, the only one there is Jamie. She’s sitting at the round table that’s been here since I was born, and on the table are takeout bags from the diner. Jamie stares at me wide-eyed as if she didn’t know I’d be here. Maybe Dad didn’t tell her I was invited. I look at the clock on the wall, then back at Jamie. “Am I early or late?”
“You’re on time,” she says, shifting in her seat. “We just got back.”
I glance around the room, listen for any sounds. It’s silent. “So… where is everyone?”
“Maggie went to her room to”—she air quotes—“‘freshen up’ and your dad went in there to comfort her.”
“Comfort her?” I ask, taking the seat beside hers.
“I think I broke her.” Jamie turns to me, her bottom lip pushed out in a pout. “I told her she didn’t have to sit in the meeting with me, but she insisted, and she sat beside me and held my hand and had to listen to everything. She barely said two words on the drive home, and I feel horrible.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I say, turning my entire body toward her. I allow myself a moment to take in her profile. She’s always been classically beautiful… in a way that doesn’t smack you in the face but haunts you in your dreams. The longer I stare at her, the redder her cheeks get, and I fight back a smile, fight back the urge to reach out and shift a stray strand of hair away from her eyes and tuck it behind her ear. I want to kiss her there, at the spot right beneath her ear. I wonder if it still makes her squirm the way it used to. Her shoulder shifts, and I follow her arm down to her hand resting on her lap, her thumb stroking the “mood” part of the pendant.
Slowly, I reach out, my fingers gently prying the pendant from her grasp. “It was initially a mood ring,” I tell her, flipping it over in my palm. “I’d found it online and had it sent to my dad, along with instructions of what I wanted to be done with it. He’d taken it to a local guy who lives in a shack in the woods surrounded by metal artwork he makes and sells.” I set the pendant flat on my palm and trace the dahlia petals surrounding it. “Everyone calls him Peg-leg Jimmy, but I don’t know why. He doesn’t have a peg-leg, and as far as I know, his name is Paul.” I pause to watch Jamie’s eyes narrow in thought. “What’s up?”