Chapter 37

A little over two hours had ticked past on my watch. I was debating whether or not I should text Sean to ask how worried I should be that Jack still wasn’t back when my phone went off.

“Hey,” I said, snatching it up as soon as I saw Jack’s name on the caller ID. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I walked the main road so far that I was closer to Sean’s place than mine, so I called him, and he picked me up.”

It was a gut punch. I’d spent the whole time he was gone trying to figure out how to connect with him, and he’d spent it running away. Again. Like he had from so many of our conversations. “You’re with Sean now?”

“Yeah. Look, I’m going to crash with him tonight. I’ll be back in the morning, but the roads aren’t lighted up there, so go ahead and stay tonight. It’s not a great drive into town if you don’t know the road. Take my bed or the sofa, whatever you want. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Sure, great.” It was all I could get out before I hung up. I turned the phone off completely and dropped it in my purse before I stood and looked around the living room. I could fit on the sofa, but it would be tight. I wandered to Jack’s small bedroom. It was as stark as the rest of the house, a double bed with a plain navy comforter on it, bare walls, and a dresser with a small pile of change on top.

I retrieved an afghan from the living room and curled up on top of Jack’s comforter. I wanted to make sure he made it home in the morning, and then…

A tear rolled across my nose and dropped to the blanket. More were coming, and I knew it. But it hurt. It hurt that Jack had finally told me about the pain he’d been carrying with him for two years but didn’t trust me to share. He’d taken off literally at the first possible second. From his job. From his life.

And now, from me.

While we’d laughed and shared and teased all day, I’d felt a growing sense of need, a desire to know everything about the man whose kisses made me lose all sense of time and place only to find myself in his eyes again. I needed Jack in my life, and my brain had been trying to figure out how to make it work the whole time we were together.

None of that mattered.

Even if I convinced Jack to leave Featherton and bring his talents to San Francisco, I’d never have all of him. He’d bricked himself behind a wall of pain I couldn’t break down. Not by jokes and distraction, not by coming to meet him on his turf, and not even by sitting and listening and carrying the weight of his pain with him in the quiet of his home.

At first, I wasn’t even sure what I was crying for. Missed opportunities, maybe. But mostly for the tragic waste of it all, for the brilliant doctor I could see that he’d been and should be again. But he wouldn’t be. He was going to stay here, holed up on this mountainside, keeping in all the pain, but also locking away all of his gifts.

I cried it all out, waiting for sleep to overtake me, but it wouldn’t come. Instead, I ran through all of our conversations and every single touch, every kiss. Every look. Every word I’d fought to drag from him, then had hoarded and replayed over and over during the last two months.

As evening wore into the deepest part of the night, I admitted the hardest truth: I’d seen this pattern of running from the hard things before. In my mom. I’d watched it play out and wreak havoc on people who hadn’t deserved the pain. Like my dad. Like the many who had come after him. I hadn’t known how to fix it then, but I’d sworn never to make their mistake.

I had, though.

Now I would pay for it.

***

I’d set my alarm for 6:00 AM so I could be on the road at first light, but it wasn’t the alarm that woke me. It was the warm, heavy weight of an arm across my waist. An arm with Jack’s watch around its wrist.

Jack had obviously come in at some point and kicked off his shoes before crawling onto the bed next to me. I glanced down to where he’d thrown his leg over mine too. I couldn’t believe I’d slept through that, but I’d been up late, staring into the dark and trying to solve an unsolvable problem before I’d fallen into an exhausted sleep. Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that I’d slept through his arrival.

I moved to slide off the bed, but his arm tightened, and he nuzzled his face into my hair, murmuring my name on a soft sigh.

“Jack,” I whispered. “I need to go.”

He lifted his head to peer down at me. “Where are you going? Stay. I’ll make you breakfast.” He leaned down and kissed me.

I shouldn’t have let him do it. It would only make leaving more difficult, and not just because we were completely tangled up again. “I need…” I tried before immediately losing my train of thought when he murmured an agreement and claimed my mouth.

I ran my hands down his shoulders, still in the shirt he’d been wearing yesterday, lost in the heat and hunger.

“I missed you,” he said softly when he pulled away before shifting his attention to my earlobe which he caught with a light nip of his teeth. “I shouldn’t have left,” he said as I slid my hands through his hair.

It was the feeling of the long strands in my fingers and that last sentence that finally broke through the fog, and I let go of his hair to press my hand against his lips.

“No.” I pushed against him and squirmed away, remembering why his hair was so long in the first place. I slid off the bed and found my feet. “No, you don’t get to sneak back in here like nothing is wrong.”

He dragged himself up until he was sitting with his back against the wall. “I know I shouldn’t have left. That’s what I’m saying.”

“I mean, bonus points for coming back, I guess, but it’s not nearly enough to make up the difference,” I muttered as I scanned the floor for my shoes. It was light enough to see now. I’d make it back into town without any problem. I’d shower at my hotel, change into fresh clothes, and drive back to Portland. The need to get back home, to where I understood everything happening around me and controlled every bit of it, overwhelmed me, and I hunted for my shoes with greater urgency. I needed to get out of here.

“Can we talk about it at least?” He ran his fingers through his hair which looked like he hadn’t brushed it.

“I don’t know. Can we? Because it actually seems like we can’t. One step forward and two steps back isn’t going to get us anywhere, and that’s what keeps happening.” I finally located the black leather booties I’d paired with my skinny jeans and slid one on.

“You mean two steps forward, one step back.”

I straightened and stared at him. “No, I don’t. I meant it exactly how I said it. Every time we get a little closer, you push me away again, but it hurts worse every time. I know I’m not a relationship expert, but that’s not good. In fact, that’s a fatal program bug.”

I walked out to the living room and snatched up my purse to rummage for the keys. Jack was right behind me. “So that’s it?”

I spun to face him. “If by ‘it’ you mean how I’ve spent months trying to coax you to open up, and then I flew up here to surprise you against every ounce of common sense I have, and then it turns out that I never should have come but at least I know that now, so hey, that’s a thing that I learned, then yes. I guess that’s it.”

“You’re just giving up?”

“I’m not a quitter! YOU are.”

He stepped back like I’d slapped him. I reached out, maybe to snatch back the words, but he flinched, and I let my hand drop. I didn’t want to hurt him, but the words were true. “You’re hiding, Jack. You’re hiding up here when Sean says you can easily find someone in semi-retirement to take over the clinic. You’re letting other people fight your battles for you at your old job because it got too hard.”

“That’s easy to say for someone whose job stakes are whether a program will get a bug or not.”

I bent to put on my other boot, and to compose myself. “I will never understand what it’s like to lose a patient. But I know quitting when I see it. And so should you, because you’re right. I quit this. I can’t be a part of this half-life you’ve made for yourself, and I can already tell you’re not going to try to become a part of mine.”

“That’s not fair,” he said.

“Am I wrong? Have you been thinking lately about how you’re finally ready to join the wider world again?”

He wouldn’t meet my gaze. Instead, he crossed his arms and kept his eyes fixed on the floor. “No. That’s not going to happen because I didn’t run away from it. I found a different way to help, and it’s here. Look.” He walked over to the large, sleek monitor I’d seen in the background of so many of our conversations. “This is the only thing I can do,” he said flipping it on. A minute later, a series of photos filled the screen. “This is why I learned to Photoshop.”

I stepped closer to study them. They showed kids in superhero costumes or dressed as powerful knights and warriors. Some looked like ordinary kids. Others bore the clear signs of a fight with cancer; bald heads, steroid-puffed cheeks. I glanced at him, my eyebrows lifted in question.

“I make them heroes in their battles. It lets them visualize a victory. I get dozens of requests a week, and I do them for free.”

They were beautiful. Hopeful. And a tremendous gift—from anyone else. If Jack couldn’t do the other things he did, this alone would have made me fall a tiny bit in love with him. But he could.

“You have the ability to do so much more for them. These are incredible photos, but you could be changing the outcome in a real way. Treating them. Healing them.”

He shut the monitor off. It went black. It was abrupt. Final. “I found a different way to fight. I hate that you can’t see it for what it is.”

“And I hate that I do.” A deep sadness swept over me, smoothing out the angry places and drowning them in regret. “I’ve never told you much about my parents. They split when I was nine because my mom, she’s broken inside. She’s always chasing the next romantic high, the shiny new love. It never lasts, because when the new relationship sparkle fades, she can’t deal with looking at the real stuff underneath. And for her, it’s the feeling that she’s never enough.” My hands closed around my keys, and I fought the urge to run to the door. “I’ve watched a string of men try to fix her, put her back together, but it’s useless until she patches up some of her own wounds. And still, there’s some poor sucker always lining up to try. I swore I’d never do the same thing for someone. But here I am.”

A fresh wave of tears threatened, and I closed my eyes against them for a moment.

“Emily—”

I held up my hand. “No, let me say this.” I drew a calming breath and refused to let the tears fall. “I should have seen this. But I convinced myself somehow that if I could say the perfect words, behave exactly the right way, find the right sequence of conversations and grand gestures, that this would work out. I swore it wasn’t my job to save you, because no one can rescue another person. They have to do it themselves. I know this.” I squeezed my eyes shut again. “I used to know this. But I can’t control your brokenness. Why did I forget that?” The last part was only a whisper.

“Emily, stay. We’ve got everything else right between us. There has to be a way to fix this.” He shoved his fingers through his hair the way he did when he was stressed. “Please.”

“I don’t know how.” I walked to the door, pausing before I slipped through it. “I have never been so close to something this real. I’ve done everything I can. And I may have failed, but at least I tried. Goodbye, Jack.”

His silence said everything as the door clicked shut behind me, and I started the long drive back to town.