Jeremy said hey to Jolene—a first since we’d started coming here, and it made me happier than it should have to see the truce between them was still holding—then gave me a look as he brushed past us. I knew what he was telling me, what I’d agreed to. “Five minutes, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said to Jeremy before he went inside and left me with a confused-looking Jolene.
Jolene
“You only have five minutes?” I liked to pretend that I was impervious to pain, but either I wasn’t trying very hard with Adam, or he knew me well enough to pick up the trace of hurt in my voice.
He drew closer. “I want way more than five minutes.” He swallowed and dropped his gaze to his hands. “I didn’t want to tell you about it over text, but my dad came over for my birthday. He’s going to try harder to get us all back together.” He tried to keep elation from his voice, but there was no missing how happy he was.
ADAM
Apart from Jolene coming to dinner with my dad and brother, I hadn’t gotten to spend any time with her on our last weekend, and after that night in my barn when she’d finally started looking back at me the way I’d been looking at her for months, all I wanted to do was spend time with her.
Well, that wasn’tallI wanted to do.
But my family had eaten breakfast together. All four of us. I’d been silently—and not so silently—screaming at my dad for months to make something like that happen, and the fact that he’d done it meant that I had to try more, too. Not the one-word responses that I’d worked up to either.
But it was hard to think of any of that when Jolene looked like I’d just hit her.
Jolene
Istepped back as unobtrusively as possible. I’d known it was coming, that his family wasn’t severed the way mine was. I’d known they’d start finding their way back to each other. I just hadn’t known it would happen so fast...or that it would hurt so much.
After the night in his barn, when I’d felt our hearts beating together, it was like a cruel joke to feel mine breaking when his was so full.
ADAM
She moved away and nodded too many times. “Oh, wow. That’s great. I’m really happy for you,” Jolene said, but her tone lacked conviction. Not because she was lying, I knew, but my birthday had gone very differently than hers. I hadn’t meant to brag or rub my happiness in her face, but maybe it had come out that way.
“It’s not like everything is going to be better overnight,” I told her. “My dad—he’s not moving back in, and when my mom dropped me and Jeremy off just now, she still wouldn’t come up to see him.”
And I’d really wanted her to, a fact I hadn’t tried to disguise the way I would have in the past.
Which just meant we’d have to try again next time—me, Jeremy, and Dad.
Jolene
How could he not see that he was making it worse? He stood there trying to convince me that nothing had changed, when I could tell that everything inside him was screaming that it had. It didn’t matter that his dad had come back to our building, or that Adam and his brother were still spending every other weekend here with him. All of that was technically true, but it wasn’t going to last. It was as though someone had put a giant countdown clock above our heads, and the numbers were racing.
My heart was racing, too, pounding so fast and so hard in my chest that I felt sure he could see it.
ADAM
Ididn’t know who I was trying to convince, me or her, but I could tell that neither of us believed me. The truth was that everything had changed, and not just because Dad had come over on my birthday.I’dchanged. I could see how much my anger had further driven in the wedge that was keeping my family apart, and I was beginning to understand that no one person had been responsible for putting it there.
I’d already decided to go with my dad to his next support group meeting, and this time I wasn’t going to stay in the hall. And when he dropped us off at home on Sunday, Jeremy wouldn’t be the only one inviting him inside. It was starting to feel like we might have a chance, and it hadn’t felt that way since Greg died. But Jolene...
Jolene
Isaw the exact moment he realized what it would mean for us if more days like that one on his birthday followed. If his dad started coming around his house more and his mom saw both of her sons wanting him to be there. If his parents started to realize what he and Jeremy had known from the beginning: that they were better together, as a family.
His words cut off midsentence, and his hands stilled. He went the opposite of red, and if I could have seen into his chest to his heart, I thought I would have seen a crack spilt right down its center.
My heart had seen the crack coming, and since it had never been whole to begin with, the fissure didn’t show as much on the outside. For me, there had never been any hope for a happy ending. I didn’t have to lay my anger aside in order to help heal my family, because anger had never been my problem, and my parents were never going to reconcile. My problem was something that made me so much more vulnerable than I’d ever wanted to be.
My problem was that, just when I realized I could be loved, that love was being pulled away.
ADAM
