I have to look away. It hurts too much. Seeing what my future could have been only to realize it never will be makes everything inside me feel like it’s atrophying. Withering. Dying slowly.
I can’t look at Torrin, so I look at the only place I have left. “I miss him, Torrin.” I choke on the words, but they keep coming. “I’m not supposed to miss him. I can’t tell anyone I miss him either . . . but I do. How fucked up am I?”
I have to break away from his hold because I need my hands to cover my face. I don’t like crying like this. Like I’m too weak to control my emotions—too weak to control my body. If I cover my face, no one has to see just how weak I really am.
“I miss the man who kidnapped me for ten goddamn years. What in the hell am I supposed to do with that?” My body’s convulsing in rhythm to my sobs. I’m such a mess—the sobs only scrape the surface of that mess.
I feel the warmth of his body huddle close before his arms rope around me, holding me. Keeping me together. He’s holding onto me so tightly I couldn’t fall apart if I wanted to. His face lowers to my ear.
“Whatever you need to,” he says in the voice I remember. “It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. And it’s okay to miss and mourn whoever you choose.” His arms tighten again when a tremor slides down my back. “No one has the manual for a situation like this, so don’t let anyone tell you how to feel. No one.” He tucks his head into my neck and sighs. I can’t tell if it’s a sigh of frustration or contentedness.
With the way my vision is blurred from the tears, the bouquet looks more weed than flower now. “He was a good man, Torrin. Sick . . . but good.”
His fingers curl deeper into my arms. “It’s your right to believe what you think about him, and it’s mine to believe how I feel about him.”
“How do you feel about him?”
Torrin inhales against my neck, then he rises. He finally looks at the gravestone in front of me. His eyes narrow at it, and I see things flash in them I hadn’t known existed inside of Torrin Costigan. I see things I hadn’t known existed in any man.
“That hell has no inner circle bad enough for a man like Earl Rae Jackson.”
Then Torrin turns his back on the grave, but before he walks away, he holds out his hand and waits. He’s not going to let me fall behind.
FROM MY BEDROOM, I hear Mom arguing on the phone with someone. It has to be Dad because she only uses that tone on him. I don’t have to listen in to wonder what they’re arguing about. It’s me.
I’m the source of tension in the house—the source of tension in the whole world it feels like sometimes.
I’m the houseguest who just won’t go away. They’ll never say anything, but the air is so thick with strain I think I’ve died of suffocation a hundred times. I keep being resurrected though. Back into the same life I don’t belong in and have to be expelled from a few hours later again.
Mom’s in the kitchen, trying to keep quiet, so I wander into the living room when I come downstairs. I haven’t gotten used to the skinny jeans Mom picked up for me yet—they feel like they’re cutting off the circulation to my ankles—but that’s the only style she bought. I guess bootleg isn’t as popular anymore.
Dad keeps the daily paper tucked into the middle drawer of the antique desk pushed up against the window facing the front door, and I find myself being pulled in that direction. Call it morbid curiosity, but I can’t help it. I think part of me’s still hoping “The Childs Child Abduction” will pass eventually. The only way to know for sure is to check the headlines.
When I slide open the drawer and pull out the paper, I don’t have to unfold it to know nothing has passed yet. They haven’t gotten bored by me staying sealed inside my parents’ house or sneaking out through the alley tucked down in the backseat of Dad’s Tahoe.
My hands brace against the edge of the desk for support because on the front page of the local paper are two photos; blown up so large they’re blurry. The first one is of Torrin rushing me to my front door after leaving the hospital. He’s in his priest outfit and managing to block me almost entirely from the photographer’s angle. The second photo isn’t quite as blurry and was taken last night at the party. Torrin’s in his tux, and I’m in my dress, and it was taken when we were dancing. Not just when we were dancing though—when we were looking at each other and smiling. I don’t remember being that close to him. I don’t remember my hand disappearing that far beneath his jacket. I don’t remember his hand being that low on my back.
We look like two people in love. We look like newlyweds dancing their first dance at their wedding. We look like . . . nothing like we should with him being who he is and me being who I am.
The first thing that hits me is that someone at the party had to have taken that picture and sold it. A friend, a family member, an acquaintance. The betrayal cuts through me like a hot knife.
The next thing I feel is anger. Red, volatile anger that starts in my chest and spills though the rest of my body.
Then I read the headline:
Father Costigan or Father Charming?
That’s it. Nothing else. Just those five words stamped in thick black letters as big as my pinkie finger.
I shouldn’t read the article. I should stuff the paper back in the drawer and forget I ever saw it. No good will come from going deeper down this rabbit hole. I know that, but I let myself fall in.