Page 93 of Haunted

“Couldn’t approve. You want to explain that?”

I hold his eyes and say nothing.

He turns away and sets both hands on the windowsill. “You were going to pay it yourself. Out of your own pocket.”

“Only because what they did on that contract was wrong. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But if I couldn’t go back to New Delhi, I could go to Colombo, or Bangkok, and it would have been just another season to me. I could have covered it, you know. The royalties come in eventually.”

“I wanted to do this for you. You wanted to be free, and I wanted to make you happy.”

“But you lied to me. You decided I had to be protected even from the consequences of my own actions. Like a child. You asked me a question earlier and I didn’t answer it,” he says. “So I’m going to answer it now, and then I’m going to go.”

“Jonny—”

“You asked me to marry you and the answer is no. It is the hardest thing I have ever said and it’s killing me, but it’s a no.”

“Is it what I said about your family? I take it back. I’ll take all of it back.” I can hear myself. I can’t stop myself either. “Is it the combat thing? I’ll get—”

“No.” He shakes his head. “And it isn’t anything from today, either. Though you should know you’re carrying about a hundred red flags. You can’t stop yourself from trying to save me, and it’s crushing me. I will never love anyone the way I love you. I know that. I’ll know it the rest of my life. And we still have to be over, because I can’t see how this ever gets better.”

And then, before I can find one single thing to put against any of it, he gives me the rest.

“And the worst part isn’t you,” he says. His voice has gone somewhere very quiet. “It’s that I like it.”

“What?”

“Every time you put yourself between me and something, part of me goes quiet. It is the only time I’m ever quiet.” He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “And I know exactly what that is. That’s the boy in the photograph. That’s the one who couldn’t do a single thing for anybody and had to be carried out of a burning neighborhood. I have spent ten years building somebody who doesn’t need that, and I can feel him dissolving when I’m around you, and the terrible part is that I am not fighting it.”

I don’t have anything at all.

“I don’t want to be a person who is frightened all the time and gets carried. And I want to be carried. Both of those, every day, at the same time, and I can’t hold both of them.” He wipes his face with the back of his wrist. “And the only way I know how to stop wanting it is to not be here.”

The hole where my chest was is so wide my cracked ribs seize around it. I can’t make a word come.

“Take care of yourself, Lance.”

He gives me the saddest smile I have ever been handed, and he goes to the door. He hesitates, looks back over his shoulder, and then he’s gone, without another word.

I stand in the middle of the emptied room with my arms still half-open around a shape that isn’t there anymore, and I can’t make myself put them down for a long time.

Chapter thirty-two

Jonny

Ipack recklessly, shoving the contents of my drawers into the suitcase with no rhyme or reason. I shove spice jars next to my underwear, chuck the sketchbooks next to my laptop, and strip the bathroom of my toiletries with a ruthless efficiency. For once, all of the packing up and moving on has come in handy. It takes me ten minutes and an internal checklist to clean the apartment out.

At the end, I take off my bracelet and bury it under the coffee grounds, where the sight of it won’t hurt me anymore. When it’s done, I close the door and slide my copy of the key under the door. Less than five minutes later, I’m letting myself into Aunt Shelley’s place.

“It’s all over the news,” Aunt Shelley says by way of greeting. She mutes the TV. “I’ve been worried sick. They said on the news that you were attacked.”

I come to the sofa and hug her. “It’s over,” I say.

She eyes my suitcase, which is currently lying in the dining area. “So I see,” she says, and sighs. “Are you going to tell me what happened between you two, or do I have to hear Jackie’s version at book club?”

So I tell her. All of it, from the beginning—Nash coming out of the dark behind that curtain, the taser, the shoulder coming out of its socket, Lance strangling him. She doesn’t interrupt once.

“And I’m fine, Aunt Shelley. I really am.” It comes out steadier than I feel. “It’s just the violence. It really scared me.”