“You don’t know any of that,” I say, but the objection sounds weak even to my own ears.
Jason shifts his gaze past me, not focusing on any one thing. “When Uncle Mike used to get drunk and pass out on our couch, what did he always say was the single greatest mistake of his life?”
He doesn’t make me say the answer even though I know it as well as he does.
“Letting the woman he loved go without a fight.”
Tears are trickling down my face now. “He didn’t mean—Jase, he never meant—”
In a voice barely above a whisper, Jason says, “Sometimes I don’t know.”
I press a hand to my mouth. He thinks Mike wishes he’d done to Dad what he did to Cal? Jason’s gaze focuses on me again. The second it does, the tears he’s been fighting to hold back start to break free. I’m the one fighting tears now. He can’t cry here. I know he can’t, even if he’s somehow forgotten. And if I cry with him...
“Don’t,” I say, blinking my eyes dry. “Don’t. Jason, you can’t.”
For a second I think I’m asking too much, that he’s reached a breaking point and no longer cares what will happen to him once I’m gone. But then he sniffs again and wipes one eye with his shoulder, a gesture small enough not to attract undue attention.
I exhale.
“No,” he says. “I know Uncle Mike never thought about doing what I did. I knew it even when the knife was in my hand.” His head lowers so that no one in the room, not even I, can see his face. But I don’t have to see him to hear the tears in his voice. “’Cause now I don’t have either of them, and the girl I love is as gone as he is. If I’d thought about it even for another day, I’d have realized that I should have loved her enough to want her to be happy, even if it wasn’t with me.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, hoping the sudden, sharp pain will keep my eyes from welling up again. I want to say something to banish the sadness from him, but I can’t do that for him anymore. I know now that I never can. My voice is thick when I finally find my words, and I don’t know if they’re the right ones but they’re all I have. “What you did—Jase—” I swallow down a sob. “It was terrible. I understand now, but I can’t—it’s not my forgiveness you need. I know you know that. But I love you. You’re my brother and I’ll always love you.”
It’s another minute before he can look up at me, and I need just as long to compose myself. He wipes his face as discreetly as he can, but when he meets my gaze and his fingers twitch on the table in my direction I’m grateful for whatever holds them back. “I want you to sleep at night, Brooke. Will you be able to sleep now...that you know?”
After a moment I nod, but the truth is everything he told me is wrong and sad and I ache so much to change the past for all of us that I don’t know if the nightmares will ever leave me.
When visiting hours end, it’s with heartbreaking uncertainty that Jason lifts his arms.
I don’t have to hug him, we both know that. It’s enough, more than enough, that I came to see him at all. I don’t feel ready to embrace him, not when just looking at him has been so hard. I love my brother, I do, but he still did something unfathomably evil. He killed someone, someone he claimed to love, someone whose loss torments someone I care deeply for.
I’m not ready to hug my brother.
But I tell him I’ll be back to visit him again next week.
CHAPTER 45
Iall but collapse into Maggie’s waiting arms when I reach the parking lot. She takes the keys to drive so I can continue to ugly cry most of the way home. She pulls over a few miles before we hit the Telford city line and performs all manner of witchcraft and sorcery on my face so it’s mostly hard to tell that I’ve been crying for the past few hours.
“Thank you,” I say, when she refills the makeup bag that she packed in advance with my shades. She apparently knew before I did that forgiving me had been a foregone conclusion.
“Figured you wouldn’t want to go home looking like the girl who snot-cried her guts out halfway across the great state of Texas.”
My laugh comes out a little more watery than I’d like. “No, I wouldn’t.”
Maggie shifts in her seat to face me. “I can’t even imagine.”
I sniff and nod. “It hurts that I could be so wrong about him, and yet, in a lot of ways I still feel the same. I know he deserves to be in prison for what he did—he knows it too—but I...”
“You still wish he wasn’t.”
I lift my gaze to Maggie’s and see that her eyes are shining. “I know I shouldn’t want that, but I do.”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
That’s when I tell her who Heath is to Jason, who he’s become to me.
She falls utterly silent.
