She swallowed, aware of what he was really asking.Were you suicidal?
She couldn’t say yes, though it would be the truth. She’d spent a solid week in bed, unable to function, the darkness growing so large it incapacitated her. Thoughts of self-harm had slithered through her brain, finally scaring her enough to pick up the phone. “Not as bad as... you know,” she said carefully. That wasn’t a lie. The time after the accident had been the worst episode she’d ever had. Which was not unusual, her therapist had assured her, given all the traumatic upheaval that had preceded it.
“But bad.” Jackson’s lips tightened. “I should have called you.”
She hesitated. Jackson had appointed himself her sole comfort when they were young, but they’d been away from each other for so long. She craved the security of familial support, yes, but that support had to be rooted in something. “Don’t beat yourself up over that. I got help. I’ve been in therapy for a while now.” The first time she’d gone to a psychiatrist, she’d felt vaguely guilty, like she was doing something self-indulgent and silly. But it had helped. It hadn’t cured, but it had helped.
Jackson nodded, but tension had carved lines in his forehead. “That’s good. I’m glad.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I did a lot of thinking and talking and I acknowledged my depression is exacerbated by a lot of things, and one of those things is being so alone.” She ran her hands over her thighs. “We lost one member of our family and it was like we lost everyone. Paul’s gone now, for good. I’ll never fix things with him. But it’s not too late for Mom and Sadia and Maile and Kareem. They’re mine. I want that connection. I need it. Even if I don’t live near them, to know I have that base... it would help me.” She could especially use a reconnection with her mom, but she didn’t want to remind Jackson of his own troubled relationship with Tani.
His sigh was long and low. “Oh, Livvy.”
“I know. I’m a marshmallow.”
His shoulder bumped hers, an unexpected show of comfort. “Being a marshmallow isn’t a bad thing.”
“Marshmallows melt.” Weak, soft, blobs of sugar. That was her.
He squinted. “On the inside, but their outsides get all crisp when you stick them in a fire.”
“This is a strange metaphor. I think we should drop it.” She paused. “And, uh, maybe don’t say the wordfirearound here.”
She was gratified when he smiled faintly. “Probably smart. Have you been by the store?”
She hid her surprise that he could speak about the building he’d been arrested for burning down. She couldn’t drive past it. “Not yet.”
He nodded, like he’d expected that answer. “Have you seen Nicholas?”
It was a lot harder to hide her reaction to that question. She cast a glance at Jackson, noting thedirection he was looking. Down the road, at the point where Nicholas had dropped her off. It was clearly visible from the porch. “I—”
“You don’t have to answer. I know.” He gestured at the house. “You don’t get to pick and choose. You face one part of your past, Livvy, you have no choice but to face it all. Around here, everything’s bound up together. And if we’re talking about things that exacerbate your depression...”
Hadn’t she thought something similar?Not all painful memories were created equal.Her annual encounters with Nicholas weren’t great for her mental health, no lie.
Livvy bit her lip and nodded. “I know. But I want my family.”
His lips went taut, and he nodded. “I understand, believe me. But you’re better off getting out of here and starting over. Find a nice group of people who love you. Have a house like this in some other suburb.”
“Is that what you did? Start over?”
“Basically.”
“Are you happy?”
Jackson’s eyes gleamed. “I’m alive.”
“Is that good enough for you?”
He didn’t answer that. “You’re going to get hurt.”
Probably. She already had been hurt.
Yet there was today, and her strange lack of hurt with Nicholas.
Pleasure and pain. It’s a circle. You’re just still stuck in the pleasure part of the cycle.
But it felt so good. Dangerously good. The kindof good that could persuade a woman to reach out annually to a man who could only give her his body and nothing else.
