“What you’re circling. Ask it so I don’t get cute with half-answers.”
She pulls in a breath that lifts her shoulders. “Why did you give up on us?”
The question happens to my ribs like a pry bar. I hold her eyes, take the pain, and shake my head once.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“Axel—”
“I never did.”
She stares at me long and hard, like she’s checking my pupils for lies. “You let me go. You watched me leave—you knew where I was going. You didn’t?—”
“I wrote to you,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I meant. “Every month.”
She goes very still. The heater hum is suddenly too loud.
“Every month?” she repeats.
“For ten years,” I say. “Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Birthdays. Holidays. Nothing days when it wouldn’t shut up in my head until I put it down.”
She swallows. “You’re lying.”
I shake my head.
“Letters,” she says, like she’s tasting a word that doesn’t belong to us anymore.
“Yeah.”
Her cheeks flush and drain. “You… sent them?”
“No.”
The hope I didn’t realize was in her eyes dies like a match in wind. She stares at me, hurt unraveling into anger, and that anger looks good on her. Alive. Fierce.
“So you didn’t give up,” she says, voice tight, “you just… wrote to the ghost of me? That’s your defense?”
“My defense,” I say evenly, “is the truth.”
“Which is?”
“I wrote because it was the only way to quiet the thing that wouldn’t stop talking.” I slide my hand along the edge of the cabinet because if I don’t touch something I’m going to touch her. “I didn’t send them because every time I put your name on an envelope I remembered the night your house burned and I couldn’t get to you. I remembered your father?—”
She flinches.
“—and I remembered that fire started in my place.”
There it is. The wire I’ve been wrapped in for a decade, stripped bare in the light of the rig.
She shakes her head. “Axel, no?—”
“I knew the panel was old,” I say, words coming faster now that the dam cracked. “We were saving to replace it and we didn’t do it fast enough. The wiring jumped. Your roof caught. Your father—” My voice turns to gravel. “Your father ran back in because you were up those stairs. And he didn’t come back out.”
“You think that’s your fault,” she says slowly, like it’s absurd and like it makes horrible sense all at once.
“I know it’s my fault,” I say. “I live in it.”
Silence sits with us. We both listen to the rig tick as it cools.
