The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass by Maisey Yates
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HE’DSAIDIT.
And there was no going back.
He’d said it, and now his whole mind was full of flames.
Images of that night that he worked so hard to never, ever see.
But they came to him anyway. Awake or asleep. And pretty much the only time he could escape was when he was wielding a hammer, the motion and the sound of the metal hitting nails doing something to drive all thought out of his head.
And he often thought that if he could...if he could just never think. If he could be like an animal and move through life focusing on survival. Maybe, maybe it would be endurable.
But he couldn’t.
Because no matter how deep he tried to go back into nature. Back to nothing, he was still a man.
A fact well proven tonight.
Dammit but he was weak.
He had wanted her. So much. And then she’d been standing there, all wet and glorious, looking at him like he might have answers.
She was about to be very disappointed. Because he didn’t have an answer. Not a single one. To anything.
“I hate it,” he said.
He didn’t say what, because it was too many things. Maybe everything.
No, not everything. Not her.
She said nothing.
She didn’t press him to continue. Didn’t ask him to clarify. And for that he was grateful.
She just sat there. Still and steady and Iris.
This strange creature that had come into his life when he hadn’t wanted her to, hadn’t asked her to. And there she was. Holding a plate of cookies and demanding that he let parts of himself that had been asleep for a long time rejoin the world.
And so... Maybe she did deserve his story.
He’d never told anyone before.
Everyone he knew...they just knew.
It had been in the news.
And no one had ever made him talk about it. In fact, they had gone out of their way to never talk about it. There had been a whole lot of sorry. And then, other than his parents and Mallory, a push to try and bring him back into the real world.
As they called it.
But no. The real world for him was gray. That space where Mel and Emma didn’t exist anymore.
“I worked in the city and sometimes I worked late,” he said.
He was surprised how flat the words were. But there was something about that that made them easier to get out. Because there were whole boulders lodged in his chest, in his throat, and he didn’t know how he was supposed to speak around them. Again, he was met with her silence, and he was grateful for it. He knew it didn’t mean she wasn’t listening. Didn’t mean she didn’t want him to speak. It just meant she was going to let him do it at his own pace.
He didn’t know what that pace was.
The story of how his life had fallen apart could actually be distilled into two lines. Which seemed wrong. But taking a long time to tell it didn’t feel right either.
It hit him then that it would just always feel wrong. Always.
He would never be able to reconcile that moment in time. Would never be able to make it fit. Would never be able to... Put it in a place. It just was.
And it was wrong.
“I came home and the house was on fire,” he said, battling against the images in his mind. He was trying not to relive it. But it was damn near impossible.
To not see the flames glowing like hell as he had driven up his driveway. And he’d seen the lights, and he’d been sure... He’d been sure that they were out. That they had to be. Because it was this five million dollar damn house with every safety system known to man, and alarms that were supposed to go off and everything designed to have easy exits.
Everything had been thought of.
And he would never know for sure what had happened.
They’d told him it was smoke inhalation. Which was the kindest of scenarios, he knew.
And he was always afraid they were lying to him.
But that meant somehow there had been smoke and no alarms had gone off in time. But he couldn’t figure that out either. Nothing made sense. That was the bottom line. And they could investigate it and comb over the debris that was left of his life and try to give him answers, but none of the answers would ever be good enough.
None of them would change the outcome.
“I tried to go into the house. It took three people to stop me. When I realized they weren’t out there...” It was all around him, even now. Like he was there. “You know how ash flies through the air. It’s like pieces of a broken world. And that’s what it felt like to me.”
He was lost right then. In that moment when he’d been on the ground, on his knees, watching that ash float through the night sky. “Like it was my life broken in pieces. My life...burned to nothing. It was. It wasn’t just like that. It was.”
He could see himself in the memory. Screaming like a wounded animal, cut from trying to get through the glass. He could even see...he’d hit one of the firefighters. Punched him. The man who’d been holding him back. He hadn’t decided to do that, not in the moment. It was just... He’d been a man possessed of a supernatural level of rage and strength, wanting to fight the flames that had consumed his world.
And there just... Hadn’t been anything he could do.
He had been a rich man. An important man. A man with all this supposed power and influence the world required. And he’d realized that night that it meant nothing. Nothing at all.
He was less than nothing.
Because he couldn’t put out a blaze with his money and his influence. He couldn’t turn back time. He hadn’t even been able to throw himself into the fire, and God knew he’d tried.
He’d been stopped even then.
Five years, and it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make it easier to breathe around.
“Everything was gone,” he said, rough. “Just like that. Everything.”
She still didn’t speak. Instead, she moved toward him, put her hand over his.
“I stayed,” he said. “I lived at an apartment near my office building. I didn’t sell the property the house was on. It just didn’t seem... I didn’t want anyone else to have it. Because it was a memorial. But I did never want to go there either. And people wanted me to get back to normal. Do who I was... I think even before I married Mel. You know, there were guys I’ve known since college, and they figured I was single again.” He laughed, and it sounded so bitter even to his own ears. “Isn’t that the stupidest damn thing? Like... Like I would just go back to who I was before. Like I just wasn’t a husband or father anymore. Like I’d never been those things. I’m not, is the thing. I get that. I can’t hold my daughter. I can’t take care of her. I don’t have school drop-off and pickup, or artwork on my fridge. I don’t have a wedding ring, or an anniversary to remember. I’m not that. But I can never be the man I was.”
She pressed herself against his back, her bare breasts flush against him. And she wrapped her arms around his waist. He felt her cheek pushed up against his shoulder blade. Felt wetness there.
She was crying. For him. He’d made her cry, and he truly felt bad about that. Or maybe just felt bad.
“Mel loved horses,” he said. “That’s something we both enjoyed. I run an equine facility in the Bay Area. For at risk kids. And there’s another program for sick kids. It just... It seems like the thing to do? But basically it’s the only thing I need money for. Except the house.”
She didn’t ask any questions. So he just kept talking. “We drove up here before Emma was born. Mel fell in love with it. She wanted to get out of San Francisco. She didn’t like it anymore. And we had the money and we knew I could work remotely. I could fly to San Francisco if I needed to for meetings and things like that. But she wanted a different life. Slower. And we bought this place. We spent months working on the house. The design. But I had a few things to wrap up down there. So we weren’t going to start building just yet. And then it was too late. It was just too late. But...”
He didn’t finish, because he didn’t need to, and he knew it. He knew that Iris understood. That he had to build Mel’s house. Because it was the last thing she’d wanted. Because he couldn’t go back and rescue her from that house that had burned down around her.
“I’ve been over and over that night,” he said. “And I wish I had been there. So that I could’ve saved them. Or...”
“No,” she said. It was the first time she’d spoken. “Not so that you could die.”
“I wished it more times than I can tell you. That if I couldn’t have saved them I could have just gone with them. But you don’t get to make those choices. You don’t get to rearrange the world like that. I mean sure, I could kill myself.”
That sounded awful, but there was no way around the truth of it. No pretending it hadn’t crossed his mind.
He kept on talking. “I could have.” She didn’t argue this time. Not even an indrawn breath. “But that... I really couldn’t do it. Because... I’m alive. Aren’t I? They aren’t. What a... What a shitty response it would’ve been to take my own life. No. I couldn’t do that. Even when it was the worst. I had to keep breathing.”
She still didn’t say anything. And he thought back to their earlier exchange. Before they’d made love.
Before, when they’d been standing out in the rain. When they had talked about her parents. About how there were no words. And how people tried anyway. And usually failed.
But what they did was pull away. And so her, pressed against him, just being with him in the grief, he realized was the kind of gift no one else had ever offered.
Everyone in his family wanted to fix him. His friends wanted him to be fixed so that they could be more comfortable.
But she was just sitting with him. And all this broken discomfort.
His story was an awful one. In part because it was senseless. You couldn’t find the meaning in the death of a young woman. In the death of a child. You couldn’t lay blame, not when the house had every safety system in place. You could do nothing but sit with the senselessness of it. And that, he had a feeling, bothered people most of all.
That this wasn’t something he could make sense of, box up and stick on the shelf of past wounds.
It was a cloak laid over the top of him that he had to figure out how to wear. Like a new skin that he couldn’t shed. And in many ways didn’t want to. Because how did you let go of something you needed to remember?
“Would you like to talk about them?” The question was spoken softly.
“What?”
“Would you like to talk about them? That was the hardest thing. For me. Is that sometimes I wanted to just talk about the good things about my parents, and not the tragedy of losing them. I wanted to be able to have good memories, and I didn’t know how. And people... They wouldn’t let me. They were sad and my sadness made them sadder. I imagine that’s been even worse for you. So do you want to tell me about them?”
He didn’t talk about them. Ever. Because it... It hurt too much. Except... Suddenly he did. He wanted someone else to know. The good things.
And it didn’t make any sense at all. That he should talk to this woman he just slept with about his wife. It was strange, though, because after five years he wasn’t confused about whether or not he’d been released from his marriage vows.
He was all too aware of it, every day.
That he wasn’t a husband. Not in a practical way.
That was where the grief came in. That he couldn’t give love to Mel or Emma in the way that he once had. Couldn’t be those things to them he’d once been. He was just a man who remembered those things.
“I met Mel ten years ago. At a work function. Her dad was CFO of a company I did business with. And... It was not love at first sight. Not for her. But we ended up talking and decided to see each other again. And then again. We dated for longer than she’d have liked before we moved in together. Then I waited too long to ask her to marry me.”
The thought made him smile. Now. They’d fought about it a lot back then. “We got married seven years ago. And Emma... We had Emma about a year later.” He stopped for a long moment, grief a boulder that he couldn’t shift. This was too heavy. But he could see her. Chubby and blonde and dimpled, and he wanted Iris to know. “She was the cutest baby that you’ve ever seen. And I’ve never liked babies. But... I knew the minute that I saw her that I would die for her.” He lowered his head. “I would have. I would have, Iris. And I didn’t get to. That is failure that I cannot get out from underneath. To have loved someone so much... You know, people say that. That you’d run into a burning building for someone. I would have and I was too late. If I could’ve saved her... If I could’ve saved Mel...”
A sob shook Iris’s frame. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She said it over and over again, and her jagged sobs covered up any emotion of his own. And he was damn grateful. To share his feelings and have some privacy in them as well.
Then he gathered Iris close, and laid them both down on the bed. And he closed his eyes, clinging to her. Committing to memory her softness. Her face. Making sure that as sleep began to drag him back down, it was Iris that he saw in his mind.
He wanted her, not nightmares. Her, and not memories that brought him straight down into hell.
He was only sorry that in sharing with her, he had certainly given her a few of his nightmares as her own.
