She doesn’t say anything. She just lowers herself into a seated position and looks up at me, invitation in her eyes. So, no jumping or flipping. Only sitting, and as soon as I do, I guess I see that there’s sort of a Jess-specific poetry about it. Surrounded by the net, it’s contained, private. It’s not really a closed door, but there’s a carefulness about how open it is.
I watch as she folds her legs, crisscross style. Her feet are bare and beautiful. She clasps her hands in the space left between her legs and takes a breath through her nose, big enough that I see her chest expand with it.
“It hurt because I trusted you.”
Quiet but clear.
A damning use of the past tense.
“I’m so—” I begin, but she holds up a hand, and that’s fair enough. I’m just trying to stall the verdict, anyway.
“I don’t trust anyone. Probably not really since my mother left the first time, when I was twelve, but definitely not since the second time, when I was twenty-one. If you were to ask me who my closest friend in the world is, I’d tell you it’s Tegan, but I know Tegan isn’t my friend. She’s not even really my sister most days, because instead I’m the closest thing she has to a mother, and she can’t see me as her sister when I’m taking away her phone for two nights because she lied about doing her calculus homework. If you were to ask me about my father, I’d tell you that I don’t really trust him, either, because when my mother left the first time, I could tell having me full-time was an inconvenience to him, no matter how nice he acted about it. If you wonder about the people I work with, I’d tell you that I pay the rent on my chair at the salon every month on time and I attend every meeting I’m required to and I keep my book fuller than anyone else, but I’ve never attended a single happy hour or holiday party with any of them. Dating? I don’t do it. I had a boyfriend when my mother left the second time and he lasted a week and a half in my new life as the twenty-one-year-old guardian of an eight-year-old before he told me things had gotten ‘too real’ for him. There isn’t anyone, Adam. Notanyone.”
I can barely process how it feels to hear Jess say all this: to hear her speak this much, to hear her reveal this much. In the moments I’ve let myself imagine a more open Jess, a Jess who’d speak about herself freely, I think I still imagined reticence: words instead of phrases, phrases instead of sentences, sentences instead of speeches. I feel like she’s stood up on this trampoline and jumped hard enough to catapult me into theair.
But I also feel like I’ve taken a helmet straight to the stomach. I doubt I could catch my breath if I tried.
“Do you know why I’m telling you all this?”
I swallow thickly.
So I know how much I hurt you.
So I know how much I lost, losing your trust.
I can’t make my mouth say either thing out loud. I can’t do anything but look at her, in case I won’t have the chance after tonight.
She doesn’t smile when she says the next part. She says it as serious as she’s said almost everything to me, ever since I met her. She says it so I know she means it.
“I’m telling you all this because I decided I’m going to try trusting you again.”
Chapter 15
Jess
Iknow he’s going to ask. Ofcoursehe’s going to ask.
I get a moment of grace before he does: a moment where Adam Hawkins—brawny, beat-up-looking Adam Hawkins, who has dark circles beneath his eyes and who has been clenching his jaw for the last five minutes at least—swallows thickly and lowers his head, reaching up to run a hand through his disheveled hair as he blows out a breath. It’s relief, I think, or maybe gratitude, and as soon as he does it, a weight lifts from my chest, too, as if my body knows I’ve made the right call.
Even if my brain put me through the wringer about it. All last night, and almost all of today. Back and forth about whether we should go.
Whether I should ever see or speak to this man again.
“Why?” he says quietly, the question I expected. Why would I decide to trust him again, after what he told me? Why would I decide to trust him, when I’ve just told him about how I’ve kept my trust from the world for years?
As soon as he asks it, I’m back in that wavering place—not about the decision itself, but about what I should tell him about the reason I made it.
For what must be the millionth time since last night, I think of his words to me in that quiet front room, the distant sounds of his family and mine in the background. The catch in his voice when he said them. The look in his eyes.
I’d miss my chance to look at you, or hear your voice, no matter how little you used it.
I don’t want to know you for the story. I want to know you for myself.
“This is so important to Tegan,” I blurt, because if I don’t, I might say so many other things that have nothing to do at all with Tegan and her need to know where our mother is. I might say things I can’t be certain are true, because the truth is, I onlyfeelhe was telling me the truth. Ifeelhe never meant to hurt me, that he wanted to tell me sooner. I feel safe with him, different around him, and when he’s beside me, the prospect of finding out where my mother has been all these years doesn’t strike me as the very worst idea in the world.
And I feel a flutter in my middle when I think of what it would be like to have Adam Hawkins know me for no one else but himself.
I watch as a flash of disappointment passes over his face, and I try desperately to talk right over it.
