Page 68 of Rescue

“What about now, Lennon? Do you still want to… stop?”

“No.” His voice is fierce. “I don’t.”

“And you have people helping you?”

He nods. “I was in a hospital, and I talk to my doctor every day.”

We both stand there, letting the quiet build back up around us. A part of me feels faint with fear at the thought of him acting on those feelings. But the other part, a bigger part, is strangely calm. Like now that the words have been spoken, they won’t have the same power. For either of us.

One thing is for sure—out of anyone else in this world, Lennon Ransome is the one person who might actually understand what it feels like in my head. Our experiences haven’t been the same—I have no idea what could have driven him to feel like he needed to end things. But we both understand being broken. And we both understand what it’s like to desperately want to be fixed.

“Okay,” I finally say, breaking the silence.

Only then does he turn to me. “Okay?”

I nod, meeting his eyes. Just like I thought, they’re unblinking. Calm. Whatever horrible things exist in his head, they’re not controlling him now.

“Just okay?” he presses.

I shrug. “It seems to cover it.”

And then he laughs, and I’m pretty sure it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. Because he can still laugh, even after telling me all of that. “Okay then,” he says.

“I want to show you something.” I pull on his hand, and he follows me back down the wall to that first Van Gogh painting that caught my eye. “Look at this church. Isn’t that the most gorgeous blue you’ve ever seen?”

He nods, but when I look up at him, his gaze is on my face, not the painting. The pain of the last few minutes doesn’t disappear; I know as well as anyone that life doesn’t work like that. But it does lessen a little bit. And that’s something.

“Okay, your turn,” I say. “You have to find something gorgeous for me now.”

He grins. “Challenge accepted.”

We wander through the gallery for another hour. Eventually his brothers, Levi, and the girls come upstairs, and we pass them, sometimes stopping to admire the same painting. But I never let go of his hand, not even when Reed’s eyes narrow when he sees us.

He shows me Monet’s water lilies, and I show him the Renoir paintings I’d found before. He shows me the garden party one he mentioned, and I decide I like that even better. We look at Degas’s dancers and Seurat and Matisse. So many amazing paintings, and like Lennon said, it doesn’t matter that I don’t know what I’m looking at. All that matters is that they make me feel something. And what I feel, standing there next to Lennon, my hand in his, looking at the most beautiful paintings I’ll ever see in my life, is hopeful. For the first time in ages, I feel hopeful.

When the docent tells us our time is almost up, Lennon takes me over to a clock that dominates an entire wall. “This is the back of the clock you can see from down on the street,” he says as we peer through the glass at the lights of Paris below us. The city stretches on and on as far as I can see. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing at a white church way off in the distance. Even though it’s tiny from here, I can see that it looks almost like a wedding cake.

“That’s Sacre Coeur. It’s up in Montmartre. I’m sure Paige is planning an afternoon up there.”

“Good.”

We stand there for a few more minutes, looking out at the city, and that feeling of hopefulness grows in my chest. “Hey, Lennon?” I finally say.

“Yeah?”

“You know what I said about us being friends?” He turns away from the city to look at me, and all I can think is that he’s once again showing me something amazing. “I think I was wrong,” I whisper. “I think we should be a lot more than that.”

When the grin breaks over his face, I know that I’m taking the most beautiful thing in this museum back with me.