Page 98 of The Fire

“I said some truly deplorable shit. Shit I couldn’t believe he would ever believe, you know?I don’t love you, blah blah blah. I was trying to be extreme. I was trying to shake him up. Make him… think. But thesecondhe left I knew I’d gone about it wrong. Like, the minute he drove away. Parker and Ilovedeach other, and I’d hurt his feelings fornothing, because clearly one little fight wasn’t gonna change his mind, right? So I went to his house.” I could smell the freshly cut grass when I thought of that day. I could hear the cicadas buzzing in the heat.

“And?” Ev prompted. “Just finish it. My heart can’t take much more.”

“And nothing. He’d already gone, his mom told me.That morning. His dad took him to Boston, got a meeting with some friend of his who worked at BU, and Parker never bothered to come back. That was that.”

Ev shook his head in silent sympathy.

“I wasn’tangry,” I said. “Not angry-angry. Just… hurt, I guess. And maybe Parker’s got a point, that I didn’t have any right to be hurt either. I’d told him to go. I’d broken up with him, and he’d taken me at my word, so that’s on me. But it sucked. And I… I guess it was easier being mad than hurt. Definitely easier being mad than getting close to him again and getting hurt again, I can tell you thatfordamn sure.” I blew out a breath. “And that’s it. End of story.”

“Mmm, no. Couple pieces of crucial information missing,” Ev argued. “Like, why couldn’t you tell Parker to stay? He’s in love with you, you said. You’re in love with him,clearly.”

“Because I’d be doing the same thing I didn’t wanna do before.Duh. Holding him back, when his real dream was out there.” I waved a hand toward… the world.

Everett blinked at me. “You… you realize that you werewrongthe first time you broke up with him, though, yes? His mom wascompletely wrong. And she put an idea in your head, and then you were completely wrong too?”

“No. Not completely. Yes, I shouldn’t have done it the way I did, but… He got his degree, Ev. He made something of himself.”

“He made himselfmiserable, Jamie. Take it from me, Boston’s a really nice town, but it’s not a magical land of hopes and dreams. No manna from heaven. Parker knows that. He left, of his own free will, as soon as he could.”

I frowned.

“And why do you think he came back here?” Ev persisted. “Why’d he come directly to O’Leary, and not head to Dublin, or Dallas, or any of the hundreds of towns in between? Why’d he start a business in the smallest, nowhere-est town east of the Mississippi, and never say a single word about leaving again until his bar burned down and he felt like he had no choice?”

“I guess… I dunno. To prove a point, maybe. To show us all what a success he’d made of himself.”

“Maybe the point he wanted to prove was that he wanted to be here all along. Because when he’s in it, he’sin it, like you said.”

I lay down on my back on the hard floor and stared up at the ceiling. It was freshly painted, but the old whorled pattern was still easily visible—an endless tangle that was eerily similar to my own thoughts.

“Parker’s an adult,” Everett continued. “He makes his own choices. He doesn’t need you to protect him anymore, Jamie. Not from shit like that, anyway. He asked you a question. He asked you to tell him you wanted him to stay. The only thing you owed him was an honest answer and the space to make his own decision.”

I rolled my head against the hard wood. “It’s not that easy. Of course I wanted him here. Jesus, I wanted to tell him he wasn’tallowedto leave. I wanted to slam the door and lock him in. But it wasn’t fair of him to ask me. Not without telling me what he wanted first.”

“Oh, right! He should just keep throwing himself at you and giving you chances to shut him down. I see. Well, that makes sense.”

I ran a hand over my face and said nothing.

“When Adrian died,” Ev said softly, “I felt like I’d put all my faith in something that didn’t pan out, and I never, never wanted to risk myself again. It hurt too damn much. So, I told myself I couldn’t fall for Silas. That it would be cheating on Adrian to feel that way.” He snorted. “It was literally the stupidest, unkindest thought that’s ever taken up residence in my brain, because my husbandloved me, and if there’s an afterlife? If he’s watching over me? He’s feeling nothing but pure joy. He’s beyond jealousy. You know? But it was easier to tell myself I was doing it for him, that I was sacrificing my happiness forhim,than to admit that I was scared.”

I sucked in a breath through my nose. “And what changed?”

“I got a handy reminder that life was short, and pain was a part of the process. There are no guarantees in love, but you’re guaranteed to be miserable if you cut yourself off from it.” Ev shook his head. “So if youreallylove him, Jamie—if you love him enough to let him go and doom yourself to misery for the rest of your natural life—then love him enough to be vulnerable with him, and honest with him, and believe him when he tells you he loves you too. Learn from the past, man. Don’t cut yourself off from it. And for fuck’s sake, don’t relive it.”

I pushed myself to sitting and felt a little lightheaded.

All this time, I’d been trying not to let the past define me. I hadn’t wanted to talk about it; I hadn’t wanted to think about the good times because they reminded me of what I missed or the sad times because they reminded me of how badly I’d fucked up. But Ev was right. You couldn’t just cut yourself off from the past like that.

The past was the fire that forged you, that strengthened and weakened you, that molded and shaped you. It formed the magnetic core at the center of your being that meant some people wandered into your orbit andstuckthere, like Ev and me, while other people, like Brian, got repelled time and again, no matter how sweet and on-paper-perfect they might seem.

The past was all the missing pieces, all the jagged cracks and rounded edges, all the tiny earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and slow-but-steady erosion that had created your personal topography.

Noone partof it had to define me. But, like Everett had said, I had to learn from it. I had to try not to make the same mistakes twice.

“You’re a really good friend, Everett. I haven’t told you that, I don’t think.”

Ev smiled, clearly pleased. “Yeah? Back atcha.”

“And you are definitely qualified to dispense wisdom to me, whenever you think I need it.”