Page 14 of Almost Home
“I really need to say something before this—whatever this is—happens.”
My eyes snapped up to meet hers and a feeling I flatly ignored punched through me. “Go ahead.”
She swallowed and inhaled slowly before quickly sitting across from me and launching in. “I apologize for my inappropriate behavior. Juliet is about my age, or close, and I’m used to a more congenial atmosphere in terms of work colleagues and relationships. I understand that I need to create better boundaries, and I can assure you it won’t happen again. I—”
“This isn’t necessary. You don’t—”
“Please let me finish. Okay?”
Her words cut through the air, and silence filled the gap. She hadn’t asserted herself like that before—honestly ever before, except when we said goodbye, when she’d left. It wasn’t her—or hadn’t been. But I didn’t know her anymore, so maybe it was now. Either way, I nodded for her to proceed and watched her swallow and straighten in her seat. She was nervous, or maybeanxious.
“I realize this setting is not where this should happen, but I can’t wait anymore, so I need you to just… hear me. For a minute.”
She embodied determination, though her jaw flexed where she clenched her teeth, and her fingers twisted together in her lap. That scar at her hairline was barely visible from here, and yet, I had the vicious need to know how it’d happened, or maybe that was the impulse to avoid what was coming.
A suspicion notched in my gut, and my stomach clenched against it. I nodded again, knowing I couldn’t say anything to stop her, especially not without sounding unraveled.
“I’m sorry.”
Her big blue eyes doubled in size as she attempted to impress these words into me. She’d already said them, but the lower, steady tone, the way she pressed her hands into the desk in front of her, the way she didn’t break eye contact—this was different.
“I know I hurt you when—when we were younger. And I wish I could explain the full extent of how much I regret what happened.” She paused here, almost like she expected me to interrupt.
I wouldn’t. Icouldn’t. For as many intense situations as I’d been through, I’d never considered what my heart would be doing inside my chest if we had this conversation. I’d imagined it a thousand times in the beginning—her calling, her showing up at my basic training graduation, her being there when I landed after my first deployment. I’d fantasized about letters she’d write, some of them starting out exactly like this. I went through a nasty, resentful phase where all I wanted was for her to reach out so I could reject her and make her feel a sliver of the misery I’d felt and that’d crept up on me whenever I turned my back to it.
It’d been years and years since I’d had any such thoughts, and I’d forbidden my mind to go to any of those old familiar places in the last week since seeing her, or the months since our first encounter. Whatever efforts I consciously made, though, the dreams had done the imagining and fantasizing and horrifying for me.
When she saw I wouldn’t be saying anything, she continued.
“I never wanted to hurt you more than you were already hurting. But I was—” A breath gusted out of her. “I was shattered.”
Our gazes held, and I could see her as though we’d been transported right back to that moment. Her small body frail from exhaustion and lack of sleep. From grief. The dark circles and grayish pallor to her skin. I’d dreamed of that, too, and those had been so far from fantasies.
“I knew that,” I scraped out, needing her to know she wasn’t alone in traversing into those memories. No, she’d dragged me there with her. Here in my office. My would-be sanctuary.
She dipped her chin, acknowledging, then cleared her throat.
“I was in survival mode. My parents—” She shook her head at herself. “No, I don’t want to talk about them. I just want you to know that I’m truly, deeply sorry. And I’m sorry for all the years that I’ve let go by without saying exactly that.”
Inhaling slowly, I crushed the rioting slosh of emotions in my gut, my heart, my mind. Enough to unpack from the day already, and I wouldn’t do it here, in front of her. “Thank you. But there was no need.”
I wouldn’t reach for her. I wouldn’t allow myself to touch her even though my body cried out for it as though it was right. We’d had a closeness, an intimacy, that was truly unique but that didn’t exist between us now.
She’d run away from it, and then she’d destroyed it entirely by staying gone.
“You don’t need to thank me. Like I said, it’s long overdue.”
“And like I said, thank you. You did what you needed to do.”
Even in the midst of feeling like I’d lost everything I’d ever loved, part of me had understood that. I’d seen the shattered look of her, and I’d known it wasn’t aboutme.I’d wished I could be the one to be there as she put herself back together a thousand times, and it’d hurt like hell not to be—to fear I never would be.
It was later, when the silence from her persisted across weeks and months and then years, that it truly sank in. She was done with me and wasn’t ever going to look back. We would never reconcile when she healed.
“Well, thankyou.For listening and letting me say what I needed to.” Her shoulders sank when she let out a big breath—relieved or just out of energy, I couldn’t tell.
Every bit of my mind wanted to follow this trail—to talk a bit more, despite never wanting to talk, to understand, to hear what happened to her after she left. I wouldn’t. I folded up all the questions and curiosity and the heap of feelings and shoved them into the little compartment in my head where such things went and padlocked it shut.
“Of course. If you’re finished, I’d like to debrief you on the meeting we just had and talk through the daily responsibilities in more detail.” Anything to distract from the tremor in my hands, a physical manifestation of the unsettling reality of her talking about all the things behind us.
