Page 65 of The Lightkeeper

Emotions. Urges. Memories. They ripped me apart inside. I shouldn’t have let her stay last night. I should’ve forced her to leave. But I was so fucking…fucked… that I didn’t even have the strength to save her from myself.

I grabbed my notebook and climbed the stairs to the lamp room, searching for the solace I found every day in these tasks. I checked the battery and the light. Wiped down the windows and the rest of the glass. But as I started to make notes in my journal for the previous day, dawn bled along the horizon, and before I realized what I was doing, words turned into lines—into curves.Full, luscious curves and tight rings of dark curls among the rumpled sheets of my bed.

“Kit.”

My eyes snapped up, my hand closing the pen inside the notebook at the first sound of her voice. I saw her in the reflection in the glass; her hair was wild, and she wore one of my shirts—the one I should’ve been wearing,I noted grimly as her attention immediately went to my back.

I swallowed over the ball of acid in my throat.

I knew what she saw. The inhuman tapestry of scars that mangled my back.

She stepped closer, and the urge I thought I’d feel to pull back—to turn around—never came. I held the rail tight like a wounded animal unable to move—unable to do anything except exist at the mercy of her touch.

“Can I…” She searched for my eyes.

Gritting my teeth, I nodded and braced myself. Like earlier, the first brush of her fingertips was like straight electricity to my skin. The scarred skin didn’t… work like the rest. It was tight. Uncomfortable to move in certain ways. And the nerve endings… they hadn’t healed the same either. Nothing had.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t stop,” I ordered when she began to pull away.

It wasn’t painful. Not like it used to be, I realized with more than a little surprise. Her fingers skated along my shoulder blades, retracing her first touch at the border of the marred skin before moving lower.

The skin used to be so sensitive, it would hurt to even wear clothes, the softest fabric feeling like it was knitted of nettles.So don’t wear a shirt.Simple solution, right?Wrong.No shirt meant constant reminders to my family of what I’d suffered—how I was still suffering—and that made it even worse. So, Istayed in my room at Mom’s house and bore the pain of clothes when I did come out.But that didn’t fix the problem either.

I shivered, and Aurora paused. “Are you sure?”

“Keep going,” I rasped.

When her fingers moved again, I let my eyes drift closed. I let her touch guide me through the darkness—to its center. After everything, she deserved to know.

“After I was discharged from Walter Reed, I came back here—back home,” I began, my voice hoarse, like the memory lane I walked down was made of rocky gravel rather than smooth pavement.One more thing to deter me from venturing down it.“After months in the hospital, all I wanted was to get back to life—a new life.” I swallowed hard and clung to the feel of her touch. “I wanted to start over. Do something… completely different. I painted a lot while I was in the hospital. Small watercolors of places from my deployments. One of the nurses saw them—told Mom that her uncle was a veteran who owned a gallery in Boston that only displayed artwork done by enlisted or retired servicemen and gave her the number.”

Tension rippled through me, and Aurora paused again, finding my eyes.

“Don’t stop,” I repeated, now unsure if I was talking to her or myself.

Her eyes softened, and she flattened her whole palm to my back, claiming much more of the scarred skin than just her fingertips had.

“At first, I wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure how things were going to go when I left the hospital or what I wanted to do,” I went on. “I came home eleven years ago yesterday.”

I heard her inhale of surprise. “On their birthday?”

A brief smile took hold of my lips. “They said it was the best gift they ever got.” My voice cracked at the end, recalling the emotion in theirs. I cleared my throat and continued, “After that,I just wanted to be normal—didn’t want to worry them. They loved my paintings, and begged me to call the owner of the gallery to show my work. So, I did. Martin Bruce. He was just about to get on a plane when I called, but he didn’t miss a beat. Told me to gather my best pieces and meet him at his gallery in two weeks when he was back from vacation; I said I’d be there.”

I stared at the glass, watching her brow start to pull together like her brain knew there were pieces to connect but couldn’t.

Meanwhile, all the pieces were together for me, their edges sharp, cutting through all the armor I’d layered on top of the memory for over a decade.

“I drove into the city that day. Traffic was crazy, so I had to park a ways away. I remember walking to the gallery, wondering why the hell it seemed so crowded.” I made a sound that sounded like a mangled laugh. “I realized why when I reached Boylston Street.”

Like dominoes, I could see the facts topple over in her mind one after another—Boylston Street. Boston. April. A decade ago.

“Kit.” Her lip trembled over my name.

“The gallery was close to the finish line—closed for Patriot’s Day to observe the race,” I pushed on with a voice that felt prosthetic—as though my real one was lost that day, too. “I don’t even know what it looked like—the gallery. Never made it.” My head throbbed like my brain was trying to fall on its own sword rather than try to go back. “I remember the finish line. The runners. The crowd. And then the blast.”

But then I felt her hands. Both palms were on my back now. On the burns and scars from the bomb’s explosion and shrapnel.

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