Claire

My knees ached, and my spine felt like a steel rod in my back as I stood from the couch. I’d lost track of time. It had to have been hours, not minutes, since Aiken had gone. Now, Smitty whined by the back door. I let him out, my eyes betraying my heart by glancing next door. The lights were on, the back door slightly ajar, the screen door closed.

What was he doing?

I wanted to rush to him.

I needed to stay away.

My brain was broken. It wasn’t operating as well as it could.

My heart was shattered, small fragments of it floating around my chest, seeping into my veins and arteries.

You must be put back together before you see him again. Otherwise, you will stay splintered forever.

I told myself to slow my thoughts, pace my decisions, but the reality was my heart didn’t want to. It beat with his. His presence alone, being back next door, was beating life back into me.

Whoosh, whoosh. I felt his energy.

“Come on, Smitty,” I called, letting the screen door slap closed behind us.

I had to keep him out. He couldn’t patch me up this time.

With the back door locked, I slid to the floor, my back against the wood, my legs out in front of me, and closed my eyes. This was how I woke up the next morning, Smitty’s head heavy on my legs, the sun peeking through the kitchen window.

The clock read seven o’clock. It was almost an hour past my usual wake-up time. Racked with emotion, my body broken, I stood and opened the back door for my dog. This was becoming a pattern. Me in the door, Smitty outside, neither of us where we wanted to be.

I thought back to a few weeks ago, when Aiken asked me to ask him to move in. It had seemed sweet, sincere, and caring. He had been concerned for my loyalty to this house. All of a sudden, I realized the house I lived in didn’t matter.

He did.

I didn’t need time alone. I’d had enough of that.

I needed to live with Aiken.

To err is human, to forgive divine, I recalled learning in my poetry elective back in school.

Yes, Aiken had done something a bit more than erring, but he’d also brought me back to life.

My eyes were sore from crying. I closed them against the daylight. I was in a daze. I needed to shower, get my act together. When my eyelids fluttered back open, I was determined to face the day, and I saw a freshly showered Aiken.

“Here, even if you don’t want to see me, I know you want this.” He handed me a disposable coffee cup from the place I used to go to with Abby, vanilla-scented steam wafting from the tiny hole.

“Aiken.”

“Don’t argue with me.” He took my hand and secured it around the cup. “I can’t stay away. I wanted to check on you. I had to check on you. Fuck it, I know you’re mad, but I had to know you’re okay…breathing—”

“Hurt,” I interrupted. “Not mad, but hurt. You hurt me when you disappeared. I didn’t understand any of it. Why? Who? Nothing. You up and left, and I was an emotional mess. It was like losing someone again, losing someone so crushingly important. That’s all I seem to do is lose people.”

“I hate that I did that to you, but you have to know I had my reasons. Whether you agree or not, I’m not a hurtful person. I’m not my mom. I’m gentle and kind. And patient. I went to a hotel to get my head straight and make sure none of this came back on you. Except when it comes to you. I want you back, along with everything we talked about. I want all of it now. I don’t want to wait.”

My heart broke for the young boy at heart, who came here searching for his mom, only to find she was a wanted criminal.

She was nothing like the woman his father had described his mother as being. Wasn’t that traumatic enough?

But I couldn’t forgo all the other layers or complexities of us. It was impossible to imagine a happy ending for us.

Or not? Maybe we were brought together for a reason?

“I see your wheels churning. The smoke coming out of your ears, your tough mind trying to make sense of the world around you, is usually a turn-on. I turned my mother in, she’s done. I’d been feeding the authorities little bits of information along the way, so when it all went down, there was very little left for them to know. That wasn’t easy, going against the ideal of who my mom was, keeping it all from you, but I did it. Period. I helped, and now you can have closure and so can I. It wasn’t the best way or the right way, I know. But I had to come to my own terms while this was all happening, so then I could help you. Maybe there’s a reason behind us being neighbors.”

That was my exact sentiment.

“But your mom. Can you look at me every day and know how I resent her?”

“Let’s take this somewhere more private.” Aiken gathered me close and turned me, coffee cup in hand. I hadn’t even realized I was shivering, but once inside, I felt the tremors racking my body.

“Come on.” He guided me to the pink couch.

“Sit and drink your coffee.” Aiken moved to get some food for my dog. Smitty, again desperate for Aiken’s attention, faithfully followed him.

When he was back, a sip of vanilla latte warming my belly, I asked again, “Can you look at me every day and know how I resent your mom?”

“I resent my own damn mom. I despise what she did, hate what she stood for, and I don’t condone how she destroyed lives. Mine too. Not as violent or final as Abby’s, and I’m sure it’s no comparison, but she took a lot of life away from me. I’ve been a four-year-old kid who needed his mom for a long time. Now I’m an adult, a grown man, who knows I wasted my time waiting for her, dwelling on her, looking for her…and I desperately want to leave her where she belongs. In my past. Deep in my past.”

“Aiken.” His name came out on a sob.

“I love you, Claire. I don’t want or need you to like my mother. I want you to love me. Fuck her.”

I gulped the coffee in search of liquid comfort.

“I do love you. I ache for you. That this happened to you makes me so mad.”

A newfound freedom unfurled in my belly. There had been a tightening there, a pull to express myself that I’d pushed against for too long. Relief washed over me at having said my feelings out loud.

“Abbie…the other one…my sister, I guess…she says she’s sorry. She wishes she’d known about all this sooner. She would have stepped up, I guess.”

I shook my head. “I can’t deal with her today. You’re enough to handle. You’re the one who is important to me. And Pops. Did you tell your dad?”

Air finally came and went in my lungs at an even pace, and I took Aiken in. Jeans, shitkickers, flannel shirt, white shirt underneath, scruff, and a shorter haircut. He was my gorgeous, beautiful, sensitive Aiken, except for the dark circles under his eyes.

My hand reached out of its own volition and ran over his cheek, my finger tracing down his neck and back up. He took my cold hand and let me have my feel.

“I told him everything. He said she’d always been good with computers. When they first met, she was working on a database for the church. But he never knew her to have a violent side, and for this, he was so sad. For you too. But he said he couldn’t renounce their relationship, because it gave him me—and now he has you. At least, that’s what he thinks.”

“He has me.” My mouth formed the words before my brain could catch up. Forgiveness was in my blood when it came to these men.

Not Abbie, but Aiken and Sam.

I still felt too raw by Abbie’s lying by omission. She could’ve said something earlier, clued me in or brought me into the fold. Yes, she was part of solving the mystery and giving me closure, but I continued to feel duped.

“Claire, be mine. Forgive me. Please, can we put this far away from us? I know it won’t be easy, but we have to try. And if that doesn’t work, try harder.”

I leaned forward, laid my head on his chest, and nodded, afraid to express the party taking place inside my chest.

“I love you,” he murmured against the top of my head. “I feel your heart beating strong against my chest. I hope that’s all for me.”

“It is, all of it. Every beat,” I admitted, my lips turned up. I was happy. “I’m going to try my absolute hardest. That’s all I can promise.”

I’m not sure how long we stayed like that. At some point, Aiken helped me to the bath, and it reminded me so much of the night he found me in the yard.

He sat on the edge of the tub and helped wash me.

“I’m going to have to deal with Mary,” I said. “I don’t want to, but I need to.”

“She was trying to help. She felt bad about you getting sick, run-down, but felt it was better for everything to be over.”

“I’m still mad at her.” I was. Sort of. Part of me really didn’t care now that I had Aiken back in one piece.

“She probably knows that.”

“Well, tomorrow I’m going to tell her. Right after I get rid of the pink sofa and you move your leather one here.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah.”