“If, what?”
“If I kept seeing her.”
“You say that like your relationship is in the past.”
“I’m not sure what it is. I… I pushed her away.” My head hung low. I didn’t even want to look Rory in the eye on this. “I know I hurt her. I must have.”
“Have you seen her since? Spoken to her?”
“Yeah. She came after me. I pushed her away, and she came back.” I pressed my fingers into my eyes. “I don’t know how to not do that.”
“Was this all before or after you received the news that you’d lost your record deal?”
“After.”
Rory was silent as I just breathed. When I lifted my head again, he was watching me with the same calm understanding and openness as always. There was no wall with Rory. There never had been. Not from his side. His specialty was dealing with children and teenagers suffering from PTSD stemming from a singular traumatic event.
He understood the fortress better than I ever did, and I’d lived in it for a large part of my life.
He’d told me, many times, though, that I couldn’t live in it forever. Not if I wanted to stop suffering. The fortress was a key to my survival, once upon a time. But it wasn’t the end.
It wasn’t my grave.
“You don’t need to die in the fortress, Johnny,” he said gently. Which he’d also told me many times. He held my gaze as he let that sink in.You could’ve done that already, if you wanted to.That was what I felt like he was saying to me with his silence. But I couldn’t be sure.
Then he asked me, “What if there is a drawbridge, and the boy lets it down?”
“Why?” I sniffed back the tears that were starting to come again. “Why would he do that?”
“So she might take a step inside.”
I looked down at the floor again.
“You told me, long ago,” he said, “that it was a relief to tell me about the wall. About the fortress. And about why you ended up inside. Do you think it might be a relief to tell her?”
I didn’t answer that. I wasn’t ready, maybe, to answer that.
It was so much easier to keep the wall high around me. It was all I knew.
But Rory wasn’t done yet. “What if she does, eventually, see the fortress?”
Questions; the man always had more questions than answers.Because the answers depend upon asking the right questions, he would always say.
“What if she sees across that vast moat?”
I looked up into Rory’s eyes, and I could see the compassion and wisdom at work there.
“I don’t know.”
“What if she sees the door in the wall, and finds it closed?” he asked me. “Have you ever thought about that, Johnny? Have you thought about what happens to her then?”
ChapterThirty-Three
Angeline
When I woke up to find myself alone in Johnny’s bed, and no sign of him or Lamar on the property, no note, no text… after the shape I found him in last night… I got myself an Uber and headed to my parents’ place.
My safe place.
