31. CHANCE

When she’s finished, I sit there, silently processing it all for a long time.

After a few minutes, Sara looks at me with naked hope in her eyes.

“Can you forgive me?” she asks, her voice on the verge of breaking.

“Forgive you?” I ask. “I’m not going to forgive you.”

Her eyes shimmer with tears as I realize what I’ve just said.

“That’s not what I meant,” I say. “I meant there’s nothing to forgive. Jesus, you sent me away from your house that night to stop your mother from killing herself. You can’t take any blame for that.”

Now her tears are flowing and I’m kicking myself for handling this like a fool. I wrap my arms around her and pull her tight against me as she sobs quietly.

“You were in an impossible situation,” I whisper. “Your choice was to make me happy or save her life. That wasn’t a choice at all. You made the right one.”

“But I could have,” she sobs. “I could have told you after…”

“Shhh. You couldn’t have found me. I didn’t have a cell phone, and I never told you where I was headed to enlist. Then you went off to school and things changed. For both of us.”

It finally makes sense. After all these years of wondering what I did to have her toss me away, only to find out she was forced to do it. What kind of teenager could possibly handle a situation like that?

“I’m so sorry I hurt you,” she says shakily. “You didn’t deserve it.”

“Sara, if anyone should apologize, it’s me. I should have known better than to believe you’d just up and hurt me like that for no reason. I should have had more faith in you. More faith in us. But I was so fucking angry, I just took off and said to hell with you and stormed off to the Marines.”

I hold her for a few more minutes until her tears finally subside and she wipes her face dry with a tissue.

“Got an issue, here’s a tissue,” she says with a harsh chuckle. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop it. That’s an order.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Don’t make me ship you off to Canada, soldier.”

That sparks a real giggle this time, and it makes my heart soar.

“I’m so glad I got that out in the open,” she says. “It’s been festering in my heart like a splinter ever since that night.”

“You and I were victims of outrageous fortune, like Hamlet,” I say. “None of it was our fault.”

She blinks at me. “Did you just reference Shakespeare?”

“Hey, I wasn’t a total washout in school, you know,” I grin. “The Marines wouldn’t have accepted me if I was.”

Her head sinks into my shoulder as she snuggles in closer. I wrap my arm around her, reminding me yet again of our nights in the storeroom.

“My parents really fucked me up,” she sighs. “Everything they did still affects me to this day.”

“What a pair we are,” I say. “Me with no parents, wishing I had them, and you with two parents, wishing you didn’t have either one.”

She picks up her glass form the table and downs the last of her wine.

“At least with my father, you knew what to expect: he’d either yell at you or beat you. But Mom was something else. She knew how to manipulate us and make us feel guilty. And she instilled so many fears in us.”

I kiss her temple. “But you’ve gotten past those by now, haven’t you?”

Sara sighs deeply. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But we haven’t. Especially the big one.”

“Big one?”

She turns to face me, her eyes locking onto mine.

“You know how panicked I would get back then that Mom would find out we’d been together?”

Do I ever. I was a thousand times more scared of her than I ever was of the cops.

“I always used that as an excuse for us not to… you know. Go all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“That was part of the problem,” she says. “But not all of it. And it’s still with me to this day. You saw it the other night in your bedroom.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“Chance,” she says quietly. “Sex gives me panic attacks. And I’m still a virgin.”