Call it intuition. Call it being a cop whose job it was to be suspicious of people.
Call it that my mind moved in her direction more often than I gave it permission to but, it’d been slowly attempting to form the full picture that was Haven Torres with the small puzzle pieces she’d been throwing my way.
I knew so little about her life. Just the few details she’d dispensed, seemingly randomly. She’d grown up poor. She’d been rescued, in some sense anyway, by a kindly couple who owned a rooftop garden. She’d worked at a grocery store so she could bring home healthy food. She had a reckless brother who I could only assume had grown up just like she had, only perhaps without the benefit of a rooftop garden to tend. Or the emotional benefits that that garden had obviously provided to Haven. Responsibility. The gift of trust.
And now she knew a few things about me. I didn’t know what the gossips had said, but I did know that what was online barely scratched the surface and definitely wouldn’t have given her the full picture.
“You’re a hero,” she said softly. “You took down a gunman who might have killed so many others.”
Case in point.
I had done that. But oh, I’d done plenty more too.
I was quiet for a good minute. Haven waited, not saying a word.
“I used to swim way over there,” I said, pointing across the lake, squinting one eye slightly as I tried to see the small public beach on the edge of what had been my uncle Nathan’s land, and now belonged to Archer. It had been public as far as ownership, but not very many people had known about it and so for all intents and purposes, it had been a private area my friends and I had all to ourselves. “Archer lives on the edge of that beach,” I explained, “and he has most of his life, at least since the time of . . . the accident. When he lost his voice. I used to make noise so he would hear me and my friends, and then I’d mock him when he came to watch us from the trees.”
I felt Haven’s gaze on me but didn’t raise my eyes to look at her.
“Why?” she asked softly, and I heard the quiet edge of surprised disapproval in her voice.
“Because I was jealous. I wanted him to hurt the way I did.” I paused again. Why was I telling her this? I never talked about this. Ever. “The day our dad died, he was leaving town with Archer and Archer’s mother to live a new life, away from here.” Away from me. “I wanted Archer to hurt,” I went on, “because no matter what he’d lost, he’d had our dad’s love—at the very end, our dad had chosen him over me. It was all I’d ever wanted and there was no way to get it back because he was gone.”
It was right, I supposed, that I was the one sitting here feeling sort of sad and lost, and he was the one snug in his cozy house across the lake, the love of family surrounding him, all his dreams had come true.
Cosmic justice and all that. It was no surprise that Karma hadn’t smiled down upon me.
Haven was staring out at the lake, the expression on her face sort of sad and sort of thoughtful, but when she turned my way, I saw empathy there too. “I understand that, Travis,” she told me, letting out a soft sigh. “More than you might know.” She paused for a second, her head tilted in consideration. “Maybe the terrible truth about love is that when it’s gone, it leaves a hole in your heart so big it feels like nothing will ever fill it. The idea of risking again feels fatal. A human being can’t possibly lose that much of themselves and still survive. And so you try desperately to fill it with things that never quite do the job. Things that sometimes hurt other people,” she finished softly.
Her words made my heart twist. And I wondered if she was speaking generally . . . or personally. Or maybe a little of both. “You’ve been hurt,” I said. She’d told me a little, but her words made me think there was much more.
But she smiled and waved her hand as if dismissing the gravity she’d obviously heard in my tone. “Of course. Life hurts us all in ways big and small. But as for you, Travis, Archer and Bree have obviously invited you into their lives for a reason. You apologized and your brother forgave you. And however you downplay it, you were a hero that day. Take pride in that.”
I let out a chuckle devoid of humor. “You think too much of me. You don’t know all the details. If you did know . . .” If you did know, you wouldn’t be sitting out here on this porch with me, speaking softly and kindly because you sensed I could use a friend. I suddenly realized that I wanted this woman to know me. But with the realization came fear, because if she truly knew me, if she knew all the things I’d said and done, not as a child, not as a teenager, but as an adult who should have known and done better, she’d turn away in disgust. And why shouldn’t she?