It feels like a missing piece of my heart has been given back to me when we hug. But then I make the mistake of opening my eyes and I see Daphne parked and waiting for me. Maggie feels the change in me and pulls back, turning so that we’re both staring at my car.
“So you’re going?”
I glance at her, unsure how much Laura told her.
“Everything,” Maggie says. “She told me everything.”
In a way I’m relieved. I don’t want there to be any more secrets between me and Maggie, but the old part of me, the part that’s been hiding things from her since the day we met, feels uncomfortable, exposed. And woefully unprepared for what lies ahead of me.
Maggie takes a deep breath then moves around to the passenger door. “Then let’s go.”
“Maggie,” I say, loving her but knowing I have to tell her no. “You can’t come with me. You’re not on the approved visitor list and—and I have to see him on my own.”
“I’m not goinginwith you, dummy. I’m staying in the car so I can make sure you go in and so that I can be there, waiting for you when you come back out.” Her expression softens along with her voice. “However you come out.”
CHAPTER 44
Details from the prison assail me when I walk inside. Acidic disinfectant smells, the soft clanging of keys from guards walking around me, and the squeaking sound of thick black rubber-soled boots on linoleum flooring. Hands and questions and metal detectors. Even the scratch of the pen as I sign in. My nerves are jangling and buzzing like live wires under my skin when I’m ushered into the visitation room. I’m never calm entering this room, but I’ve never felt so primed to bolt before. Counting cracks in the ceiling or eavesdropping on neighboring conversations, nothing distracts me from the lone door in front of me. When it finally opens, I nearly do run.
I’m not ready to see him, not ready to contend with this new horror, the sure knowledge that my brother committed cold-blooded murder. And yet, as repulsive as the reality is, when I finally see Jason’s face, the orange of his jumpsuit bringing out the sallow green in his skin, the startled yet relief-filled look in his eyes, revulsion is not there. I don’t feel it when he sits across from me and folds his trembling hands on the table. His chin quivers once before he starts talking.
“I thought maybe I’d never see you again.”
I suck in a breath, not wanting to admit that I’d had the same thought. Even now I don’t know what to say to him. It hurts. It hurts so bad that it makes me want to hurt him, even if it’s only with my silence.
Jason’s eyes well with tears as he looks at me. “I wouldn’t have blamed you. I don’t blame Dad or Laura.” He chokes saying her name, and my heart clenches in response. “I can’t give Cal back his life, not even by spending the rest of mine here. I can only tell you I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Tear-filled apologies tumble from his lips and my chin starts quivering too. “I killed my best friend and I don’t deserve forgiveness for that—” His voice cracks. “I wish I could take it back, Brooke. All of it. I wish Cal was alive and that I was d—”
“No,” I whisper, squeezing my eyes shut as my heart threatens to stop. “Don’t say that.”
He tries to soften his voice if not his words. “He’s not the one who should be in a grave.”
A tear slips from the corner of my eye. I wish Cal were still alive too, but I’ll never wish Jason dead.
Because he’s my brother.
And I still love him.
I love him for all the reasons I tried to give Laura—for swimming at Hackman’s Pond together, for waking me in the middle of the night to play outside the one winter it snowed in Telford, for putting a frog in my cereal box as a kid so that I nearly screamed the house down when it hopped into my bowl, for telling me I was beautiful when I got my braces, for telling me I was a brat when I refused to wear the scarf Laura knitted me for Christmas, for telling me Mark wasn’t good enough for me and that no one ever would be.
The realization jolts me in my chair. It’s almost as much of a shock as learning the truth about that night. The two facts don’t easily reconcile, especially when I think about Cal’s family. One has caused the other the single greatest pain they’ll ever know. I feel sickness twist deep in my belly at my own clashing emotions, and a different kind of despair knowing that whatever I had with Heath is over too.
I try not to think about that as I sit with my brother, unable to reach him in every sense of the word as he tries to explain how he ended up standing in front of Cal with such hatred in his heart.
“It’s my fault,” he says, sniffling. “I’m not telling you this to change that. I’ll regret what I did for the rest of my life. I just didn’t want to become Uncle Mike.”
I draw back. “You—what?” But I think I understand the answer even before he gives it.
“He’s been in love with Mom since college, and he swears she loved him back, at first, before she met Dad.”
“Jason.” There’s so much sadness in the way I say his name. “It’s not the same. Mom barely dated Uncle Mike, and you and Allison were practically engaged.”
“She still chose him.”
I don’t know if he means Mom chose Dad or Allison chose Cal, but however much I love Uncle Mike, the future parallel is ludicrous to me. “But you’d have met someone else. You wouldn’t have become like Uncle Mike and—and—”
But Jason just looks at me until I fall silent, remembering how he lost it with me on the phone for talking to her.
“I would have,” he says it with such conviction that another tear slips down my cheek. “I’d have loved the same girl for the rest of my life, stood beside the man I wanted to be at her wedding, played godfather to her kids while cursing the fact that they weren’t mine. I’d have probably become a drunk too when it all got to be too much. I’d have watched her and regretted her with every breath I took.”
