Page 101 of Haunted

“I thought you wanted to turn me back into what I was when she was alive,” he continues. “But you weren’t doing that. You were trying to show me what she’d done to me, and I wasn’t ready to hear it.” His voice breaks. “I’m so sorry. You are nothing like her.”

“Why are you here?” I manage. “What is it you really want to say?”

He looks at me directly. “What I realized wasn’t really about you. It was about me. I was living a lie for most of my life, because I believed in lies. But the truth is that the only place I ever felt at home was with you.”

“I don’t know what to say. Because if that were true, you wouldn’t have left me. Again.”

“I know, Lance. And I’m sorry. I came here because I love you, and if there is some way that we can be together, I want to do it, no matter what the cost.”

I fold. “You know I’ll say yes.”

“You don’t have to.”

I brace against the pool table and lower my head. My breath comes in hard gasps. “I just—I’m afraid.”

“Of what?” he asks.

“How long I get before I fuck it up again.” My voice isn’t steady. “Because I’m pretty sure I will.”

“Then let’s future-proof this,” he says.

I look up. “What do you mean?”

“Lance, I love you, but you still dream of fires. You were sent into life-threatening situations as a Marine. You were in a toxic, abusive marriage. You need counseling or therapy or something that specifically helps you deal with all that trauma.” He pauses. “That’s my condition for us getting back together.”

I want to make him promises. It’s so easy, it’s already loaded in my mouth. And I don’t let it out, because agreeing that fast is the reflex that got us here—me promising to fix the problem, secure the objective. Jonny isn’t an objective.

“What if it doesn’t work?” I say instead, and my voice isn’t steady. “What if I do all of it—the fires, the Corps, Nash—and I’m still the man who almost killed someone with you standing three feet away? What if that’s just what I am now, and no amount of talking scrapes it out?”

He doesn’t rush to tell me it’ll be fine. He just holds my eyes. “Then we’ll know,” he says. “And we’ll deal with what’s true instead of what we’re scared of. But you don’t get to decide right now that it won’t work and call that protecting me. That’s just protecting yourself from hoping.”

It lands under my sternum, because it’s the one position I never admitted I was holding—the one where I don’t have to want this and lose it.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll try. I don’t know if it’ll be enough. But I’ll try.”

He lets out a long breath, like he’d been holding it since he walked in. “That’s the one I needed to hear,” he says, unsteady. “Not done. That.” He wipes his eyes. “Okay. Now you. What do you need from me?”

He’s asking me to set a boundary. He’s trusting me to name what I need. Nobody has ever done that.

“I want you to enroll in a martial art of my choosing,” I say.

He looks at me suspiciously. “Why of your choosing?”

“Because I know what works and what doesn’t, and most of it doesn’t. Half the places in this town will sell you a black belt in eighteen months and a whole lot of confidence you can’t cash.” I make myself say the rest of it. “We can find it together. But if somebody comes at you and I’m not there, I have to know you can put him on the ground. That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”

He takes a beat to mull over it. “Okay,” he says.

I feel encouraged enough to continue. “And also: about living together. Here’s what I want: I want you to move back in today, but I’m sick of you making the call that you need to leave without talking to me. So if you say you’re in, you have to be in unless we talk about it first.”

“You deserve that much.”

I smile. “Well, I got two. Your turn for one.”

“I actually don’t have any that really matter.”

“Then bank it for when you need it. I trust you. We’re really doing this?” I ask.

“Yes. I guess we are.”