Page 120 of Soft Flannel Hank

“It fell on the floor. Probably when you closed the door.”

“Oh,” she whispered. “So you thought—”

“I thought you stole the truck and abandoned me. Yeah.”

“Even after the week we had? Even after I promised?”

It wasn’t the thing to say to him. It might have been true, but that didn’t mean that it nested well with his history. Because while heshouldhave been reassured by the last week, he hadn’t been. He couldn’t have been.

“You promised, and then you still left!” he shouted.

She shot to her feet in front of him. “I left to protect you, Hank! To keep you safe!”

He stood as well, slower because he was hefting his body up from his knees, which crackled as he rose to his full height, a head and then some taller than her. “I didn’t need you to keep me safe! I needed to keepyousafe! IpromisedI would keep you safe!”

“Why do you think that my safety matters more than yours?” she said, rising onto her toes to get closer to his face. “Why do you think my life matters more than your life?”

“Because it does!” he barked.

But if his anger was smoke from a burnt pan, that truth—that simple truth that he cradled in his hands—had the same effect as throwing open a window next to the stove. All of the smoke, all of the fight left him in a rush.

In a soft, choked voice, he said, “It matters more to me.”

Esther settled back onto her heels. “Hank….”

Hank took a deep breath. “I have felt more like myself in the last month since meeting you than I had for seventeen years. Seventeen years, Esther! Do you know what it feels like to be a ghost in your own house? In your own life?”

She bit her bottom lip and Hank watched her top teeth make a dent in the soft pink peach slice of her mouth.

He went on. “And then you came along. And you… you made me hope. You made me hope that things could change. That they could get better. That I could have a life again.” He stopped and rubbed a hand down his face. And then his hoarse voice cracked with emotion as he said, “You made me hope that I could be happy again.”

“Hank—”

“You kept dangling that hope in front of me and snatching it back. And I know it was a misunderstanding every time. I know that. And I’m not trying to punish you for it. But my heart… my heart didn’t know. And then at the cabin, I finally let myself believe it. I let myself believe that you wanted me, that you wanted to… maybe try to make a life with me. Me. As broken and ruined as I am. And don’t you dare say I’m not. Because I am, Esther.”

Hank took a deep breath. “But you made me feel like I could fix myself. Like I could put myself back together. Like you knew where to find the tools that I’d been looking for all my life. And then you left. And I know why you did it, but….”

The words were tumbling out. He didn’t think he’d ever spoken so much in so short a time in all his life. It was like a floodgate. Once he started, he couldn’t stop the flow of those horrible, vulnerable words as they poured forth. Horrible because they hurt. They hurt to hold inside, and they hurt to release. But he did it anyway.

“I was so scared, Esther. I was scared that you were gone forever. But I could have lived with you being gone as long as you were safe. But then you came here.”

“I had a vision,” she said. As if that excused it. As if that would make it better.

“I’m sure you did,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m sure you planned to rush in here and throw yourself in front of the bullet and save my life by giving him yours.”

Hank felt the tears rising, burning behind his eyes.

“But don’t you see?” he whispered, his lips and throat and voice thick. “Don’t you see that without you, the life I was living isn’t a life at all? That I’m a ghost without you? If you had left, if you had been safe, I would have been haunted by the memory of you, but I could have lived. Because you reminded me that I could. But if he had— if you had— I—”

He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t finish. But he didn’t have to because in that moment of dangling silence, Esther had gripped both of his hands in hers and brought them to her lips. She kissed his rough, scarred knuckles and held them under her chin as she looked up at him.

“Can I haunt you?”

“What?”

She smiled against his knuckles. Disbelief washed over him. Disbelief and terror. Because she was offering him everything he’d ever wanted from her.

“Can I haunt you and make you take care of yourself and never ever let you forget how incredible you are? I’ll be a worse ghost than you ever were,” Esther whispered.