I don’t fucking know how to stop.
So the best thing is for her to get away from me, before I hurt her even more and have to see that crestfallen expression on her face again.
Same expression that’s there right now, darkening her pretty eyes as she says, “Blake, you’ve got to stop fighting your fears.”
“Don’t need a therapist,” I throw back, sliding off the table, dropping myself down on my good leg when I don’t want to test the bad one right now.
As mad as I am, as fucked up in the head over this girl who tugs me every which way, it might just stress collapse on me.
“This session’s over. No more appointments. I’m grateful, lady, but don’t try this again. Just go home, Peace. There’s nothing you can do to help me.”
“No,” she says softly, but with a firmness that says she knows she’s right. “There’s nothing I can do to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.”
My jaw tightens.
I can’t.
So I just listen to her packing up her things, turning my back on her—
And freezing as I see Andrea standing in the door, the cold swirl of night at her back, looking at me with the closest I’ve ever seen to contempt on my daughter’s face.
“Wow,” she says. “And I thought Mom dying fucked me up.” Her voice bleeds with disappointment, with hurt, and shit if that doesn’t cut me deep, knowing my baby girl looks at me and sees someone she can’t believe in. “You can’t even be nice to someone who’s just trying to help you?”
“Andrea…”
“Don’t Andrea me.”
Don’t know when my daughter grew up.
But she sounds more adult than I’m capable of being right now as she cuts me off with her quiet, withering words. She sweeps me over with a look that says I’ve let her down.
Then, shaking her head, she holds her hand out to Peace.
“Come on. I’ll help you load your things in the car,” she says, and even if I’m hurting, I’m so proud of the softness in Andrea’s voice, the gentleness and sympathy she’s showing Peace.
I don’t even care that Andrea’s taking Peace’s side when she’s right.
“Thanks,” Peace says with a wistful smile, her head bowed.
And they leave me standing there in the middle of the living room, nearly naked in all but the heart I guard too well.
They walk out of the house and leave me alone to my bullshit.
* * *
This time, I can’t skimp on the apology.
After Andrea and Peace left, I sat down in my bedroom for a long time, just thinking. Getting myself together, trying to work through these messy feelings that still make no sense.
The autopsy report said Abby’s aneurysm was congenital.
She’d been born prone to high blood pressure and clotting, a lethal cocktail just asking for anything from varicose veins to deep vein thrombosis to clogged arteries to brain clots.
She hit the jackpot on the latter.
Wasn’t anything but shit luck in life and maybe her folks gifting her a few genetic time bombs.
It probably would’ve happened sooner or later.
I stare at my clenched fists, listening to the sounds of Andrea coming home and shutting herself in her room with a slamming door.
Why am I doing this?
Why do I feel like I gotta save everyone, even people who can’t be saved at all?
You ask a shrink, and they’d say I’m some kinda egomaniac. Savior complex. Gotta be everyone’s hero but my own.
I don’t think it’s that, though.
I’m scared of losing more folks, so I feel like if I just try hard enough, then I won’t anymore. Even though it doesn’t work that way.
I still remember folks I fought with in Afghanistan. The people who died when that bomb went off and shredded my leg—people who were like my brothers and sisters.
Jenna Ford, too.
Warren’s sister.
We grew up together, her always with War, inseparable twins. Everyone loved the shit out of Jenna like she was their sister, daughter, or the love of their life.
And I lost her because she saw the wrong things and a monster arranged an ‘accident’ to shut her up.
Lost my old man, too. Dead of a heart attack.
Lost Abby, slipping through my fingers when she was just feet away from me, going cold on the floor, me having no damn clue.
And then Ma.
Dying with Holt, and me not even there to see her go.
I get what Peace meant about not seeing her dad die so it’s like his body wasn’t real. He didn’t really die.
That’s how it is with Ma.
For all the weird conflicted feels I got with her, the love and hate and fear and frustration and resentment, there’s still this weird void that can’t think of her as dead.
I gotta let go.
But first I have to go apologize to Peace.
She was right. Brutally so.
And I gotta stop carrying around this poison, using it as a club to drive people away.