Page 61 of The Truths We Burn

I had pushed him too far over the edge, but even still, I gulp when I watch him elevate his arm, ready to strike me.

My body tenses, stiffening up to prepare for the blow, but it doesn’t come. Instead, I hear my door opening and my father’s voice.

“Sage, where are the keys to your car—” He stops. “Am I interrupting something?”

Easton clears his throat, putting his arm down. “No, sir.”

I retract from his space now that my father is here, wrapping my arms around myself.

“Why do you need my keys?”

He sighs, running a hand down his face. “I have to go to Portland, and your mother wants the car with her. Apparently, someone set the lake house on fire. The fire department is waiting for me to arrive so I can file a police report. Whoever did it obviously wanted us to know it wasn’t an accident.”

And it’s then that everything really falls apart. When my entire soul obliterates onto the floor in front of me.

I let the tears fall freely. I let them run past my ducts and layer my cheeks with their warmth.

He couldn’t even let me have this one thing.

I had broken him, so he took everything from me. He left me with nothing.

The lake house was mine before it was ours. If anyone deserved to burn it down, it should have been me.

I know I have no right to be upset. I said awful things to him; I said what I had to to get him to believe me so that he wouldn’t try and come back.

But I thought…I thought I could keep the lake house. I could use it as a time capsule of us, going there when I needed to remember what it felt like to be with him.

And now I can’t even do that.

I have nothing left.

The last of us had been torched inside that house.

I hate him for doing that, for taking what we were and making it cease to exist. Burning all the evidence, all the laughter, all the memories.

As if they had never even happened in the first place.

I hate him for this.

I hate him.

I fucking hate him.

But not nearly as much as he hates me.

He doesn’t just feel like fire.

He is fire.

He is the flame, the flint, the burn.

Like the Egyptian god Ra, he encompasses all that is warm.

He is my fire god, and I live to burn for him.

Sage

“Open.”