She steps forward. Not much. Enough. “I never blamed you.”
“I did,” I say.
“Then you’ve been wrong,” she fires back, heat rising. “For ten years.”
I hold her stare. “I watched an entire family’s history burn because ours sparked. I was the one who should have gone into the smoke and never come out. Not him.”
“Stop.” Her hands are fists now, small and furious and shaking. “Don’t you dare rewrite this. My father made a choice.”
“Because my house put him in it.”
“Because he loved me,” she snaps. “Because that’s what he would have done for anyone on that street. Because he was a good man and you are not allowed to turn his sacrifice into your penance.”
My breath leaves hard. “What else would you call it?”
“Grief,” she says. “And you aren’t the only one who carries it.”
I look at her. Really look. The lines she hides in daylight are there, faint and real: the years she wore a brave face for other people’s emergencies while her own sat quietly in the back row and waited for her to sit down with it. The reason she learned tocount breaths and take pulses and talk panic out of bodies. The reason she left.
“I didn’t send the letters,” I say, slower, “because every one of them sounded like a man asking you to come back to the fire. And I didn’t deserve to ask that.”
She stares at me like I’m a blaze she’s deciding to walk into anyway.
“How many letters,” she says, voice thin. “If I asked you for a number.”
I think about the box. The weight of it. The different handwriting because ten years changes even that. The envelopes with stamps that never saw a postmark.
“Hundreds,” I say. “Too many.”
Her lips part. She’s breathing fast again. She presses one palm to the cabinet beside me, like she needs to hold herself up or hold me in place, I can’t tell which.
“What did they say?” she asks.
“Everything.” The word lands heavy.
“Be specific.”
I let my head tip back to the metal behind me. It’s cold; it helps. I close my eyes, then open them because I want to watch her face when I cut myself open.
“I told you about the first morning you weren’t across the street when the bus went by and how I pretended I didn’t look for you every turn,” I say. “I told you I found your hair tie in the pocket of my jacket and carried it for a year like an idiot. I told you about the day the framing went up on the new house and my hands shook so bad I had to sit in the truck and breathe into my own shirt like a fool. I told you about the kid we pulled out of a wreck on Juniper and how I said your name in the dark between sirens because I didn’t know where else to put it. I told you about holidays when the town lit the tree and I looked for your face andabout nights I dreamed the door opened and you were standing there asking if we still had pie.”
Her hand presses harder into the cabinet. Color slides up her throat.
“I apologized,” I add, voice going raw. “Over and over. For the roof. For the night. For not holding you harder. For letting you walk to the bus station with a suitcase and pretending I couldn’t go after you because I didn’t have the right to be selfish.”
Her eyes shine. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because I was sixteen and stupid and I thought the brave thing was letting you run toward a future that didn’t have my ash all over it.”
She makes a sound that might break me in half if I let it.
“Say you’re angry,” I tell her, and I mean it. “You can be. You should be. I’ll take all of it.”
She shakes her head, water in her eyes, fight and tenderness wrestling in the lines of her mouth. “I’m angry we lost years,” she says. “I’m angry you were alone inside that for so long. But I’m not angry at you for the fire. Not once.”
Something inside me flinches like a body resisting light. “You should be.”
“I choose not to be,” she says, and the way she sayschooselands like a hand on my back, firm and warm and not letting me step away from the truth. “You didn’t cause my father’s death. Faulty wires and a split-second decision and a man’s love did. If you need to hate someone, hate the code that let that panel stay in a house too long. Hate the winter that made the flames run fast. But don’t you dare hate yourself and call it justice.”
