“When I feel conflict, it isn’t those things I remember, Jade.” He holds his hand out for me to take. I want to. Everything inside me is being pulled to it. “I remember you.”
His hand hangs there for another minute, then his fingers curl into his palm, and he draws it back. He runs his finger beneath his collar like it’s choking him.
“I don’t get it. How you can be so good at this”—I wave at him sitting there in his black and white—“and not feel conflicted when it comes to us.”
“There’s conflict in me.” His eyes lift to meet mine. “So much I feel like it could eat me alive if I let it. I love what I do. I believe in what I do. I know I took vows, but I made a promise to you first. If I’m forced to make a choice, it will be you. Every time.” He exhales, and his eyes lower. “It will be you.”
I feel as close as I ever have to taking his hand and asking him to make that choice. I feel my resolve weaken, and I know the longer I stay, the worse it will become.
When his phone goes off again, I say, “I’ll give you some privacy.”
Standing up to walk away, I feel conflict of my own ripping me apart. I want him back. I want what we had back. Everything, not just the friendship and adventures. I want to pretend we can pick up where we left off and that the question he asked me that last night can become a reality.
I also want him to have as peaceful a life as he can from now on. I don’t want him to give up everything for me, because he’s already done it once. I’ve already had the love of a man who gave me everything—I have no right to expect it a second time.
To ask him to give it all up so we can be together would be such a selfish act that I think it could rip us apart anyway. He’s sacrificed enough.
“Jade—” He turns in his seat, watching me leave.
I keep going, but each step gets harder. Each one rips off another chunk of my heart. “Just let me go, Torrin.”
A sigh drifts from the waiting room. “I don’t know how.”
IT ISN’T GRIEF I feel when I pass through the cemetery gates this time—it’s rage. The kind that feels like it’s about to spill out of me in waves.
After leaving Torrin at the hospital and saying what I did, I’d fought the urge to turn around and go back—to tell him what I want to . . . but what I know I can’t.
Once the bus stops at that same bus stop and I get out, my mind shifts. It isn’t Torrin I’m thinking about now.
There are actual cars and people around today but not many, and instead of crawling through the gates like last time, I pass through them. As I storm down the same roads and paths, I feel hot instead of cold. It’s another sunny day, and I’m wearing another sweater that conceals my neck, but it isn’t anything on the outside that’s heating me—it’s coming from the inside.
A furnace has been installed inside me, and it’s pumping heat throughout my body. The closer I get to the gravestone, the hotter I feel.
Jogging the last bit toward it, I have to bite my lip from shouting what I need to say right here. This time, I’m glad he’s been buried out here because I can scream all I want and probably no one will hear.
This time, I don’t kneel at his grave. This time, I don’t cry silent tears. This time, I don’t feel confusion. This time, the only thing I miss are the ten years that have been stolen from me.
“It’s me, Earl Rae.” My voice quivers with its anger as I step onto the cement gravestone. I glare at it. “Remember that girl you decided to take one night and play make-believe was your daughter? That girl?”
I see Torrin’s face fall in that fifth-floor waiting room. I see him reach for me and me unable to reach back. I see his smile and hear his question and envision the way my life could have been.
Then I see red.
“You took my life from me, you sick, pathetic bastard. You didn’t ask. You didn’t care. You just took it. That was my life. Mine. It was a great life that you took away because you were a bad person. An evil man.”
I don’t wipe the tears away, because unlike the others, these are derived from anger. They don’t hurt as much as the other kind. They actually feel pretty damn good.
“I loved him. He loved me. And you took that from us. You took it, and I can never get it back because you twisted and twisted me until I’m not sure I even remember what love is. How it feels. How it looks. I can’t remember . . .”
When a splash of sadness soaks its way inside me, I grind the dried weeds still resting above his name with the toe of my shoe.
“He still loves me, and I still love him, but I’m a fraction of what I used to be. That’s all I’ve got left to love back with, and it’s not enough. He deserves it all, and all I’ve got left are scraps.” I surge with anger that rolls down from my head. I hope it soaks into the ground and somewhere, in that inner circle, Earl Rae’s hell gets a little hotter. “I hate you. I hate you so, so much. I hate you more than any person has ever hated someone else.”
I don’t know if anyone hears me. I don’t know if anyone sees me. I don’t care.
“You want to know why your daughter probably ran away with her mom, you sick, sick fuck? Because she couldn’t wait to get away from you. You want to know why she stayed away? Because she never wanted to see you again. Because look at your gravestone, Earl Rae—no one cares.” I kick the dried weeds away until they’ve disappeared into the grass. “You are a bad man, and no one mourns a bad person. You are a sick man, and no one loves a sick person.”