“Do you love her?”
When Elise asked the question, everyone stopped talking. She hadn’t raised her voice, so Cam wasn’t really sure how he, and everyone else, had even heard her. But the simple, calm question cut through all the agitation in the room, quieting the storm.
“Tell me the truth,” Elise said. “Do you love her?”
He looked down at his discarded Kindle. It was in sleep mode, with a picture of the cover of Jane’s book on the screen. He reached out to touch it, as if it were a talismanic object that could lend him some of its power.
“Yes.”
Once he told the truth—after that little “yes”—he tried to make them see that it didn’t actually change anything. He tried to explain to them that it was because he loved Jane that he had rejected her. That a quick, singular humiliation was better than the lifetime of disappointment he was otherwise capable of inflicting. When had he ever done right by a woman? He tried to make them understand that he’d gotten it wrong from day one, with Alicia.
“That wasn’t your baby,” his mother said quietly, drawing an astonished gasp from Jay.
“What? You knew?” Cam demanded, suddenly angry. She had known that all these years? Hot adrenaline coursed through him.
“Her parents came to see me before they left town,” she said. “I should have told you, but…”
“But what?” he demanded, trying and failing to wrap his head around this new information.
“You were hurting so much,” she said, still speaking softly, like he was a wild animal she was trying not to spook. “You started pushing me away. I was afraid you would see my knowledge as an intrusion on a matter you were trying to keep private. As overstepping.” He thought about how often in those years he had accused her of precisely that. Even an innocent question about his day he would twist into an unwelcome invasion of his privacy. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding her hands out to him like she wanted to come closer but didn’t dare. “I can see now that it was the wrong decision, but at the time I thought I was preserving your dignity. Respecting your privacy. Protecting what was left of our relationship.”
So his mother knew the truth about Alicia.
And of course Jay knew the truth about Christie. Which he proceeded to share with everyone. The whole humiliating story about how Cam had come home to find that she’d…moved on.
And it went on from there. Cam felt like he was in a witness box being cross-examined by a hostile prosecutor. Except that was wrong, because everyone in this absurdist courtroom was defending him. He was the one insisting on his own guilt. So if he was the prosecutor, who was that guy on the stand everyone was arguing about?
And just like in a courtroom, they were twisting what he said, ferreting out little bits of truth, piecing together the big picture. When his mother asked him a series of direct questions about the circumstances surrounding his discharge from the army, he couldn’t lie to her. Whatever else happened, he was done hurting his mother. Their time together yesterday had meant everything to him.
“So what you’re saying,” said Gia, holding up her hands like they were at an evangelical revival, “is that you let yourself take the fall for this Becky person. The same way you did for your high school girlfriend.”
“It’s not that simple—”
Jay cut him off. “From where I’m standing, I’m thinking, yes, it is that simple.”
How to make them understand that intentions didn’t matter? That it all added up to the same outcome? That what people believed about him had become true—or maybe it always had been true. That the distinction didn’t matter. A fallen angel was still fallen.
“I owe you an apology,” said Jay.
“What? No.” Goddamn it. He did not need that. He didn’t want it.
Then the room exploded again, starting with Jay and Cam arguing over who owed whom an apology, then on to Gia and his mom drawing wild, unfounded conclusions over what they were calling his secret heroism.
“Enough.” Cam raised his voice to cut through the din, unleashing some of his accumulated anger at his audience. “The details don’t matter. What matters is that I’m no good for—” Fuck. His voice broke. He couldn’t even say her name. “For someone like her,” he finished on a mortifying whisper.
The room was silent for a long moment. At least that was something. Then his brother spoke. “We’ve had our troubles over the years, Cam, but I never took you for a coward.”
Everything in Cam revolted at the word. It had taken every ounce of strength he had to witness Jane, walking toward him with her heart on her sleeve, prepared to give him everything, and to look at her with a blank face and turn his eyes to the ground. That wasn’t cowardice. That was the strongest fucking thing he’d ever done. He wanted to lunge at his brother, to pummel him with his fists. But instead he pulled back sharply on the thin thread of control he still had, and said, “I’ll only hurt her. I can’t do that. I refuse to let her settle for me.”
“You’re not afraid of hurting her. You’re afraid of getting hurt yourself. I get it. You had a bad run, with Alicia and Christie, but—”
“Christie may have done a shitty thing,” Cam said, unable to stop himself from interrupting, “but she saved me. Christie and the army saved me.” He huffed a bitter laugh. “For a while, anyway.”
Jay scoffed. “Really? Because from where I’m standing, it’s looking a lot more like you saved yourself.” When Cam didn’t respond, Jay threw up his hands. “Anyway, as I was saying: You want to be a coward? Slink away with your tail between your legs? Fine. Your prerogative, bro. But at least own up to what it is you’re actually afraid of.”
The thin thread connecting Cam to his sense of control finally snapped. He moved toward his brother, thinking of nothing but getting Jay to shut that taunting mouth. But Jay, ever the bigger brother, was quicker than Cam. The room exploded again as Jay shoved him, hard.
“Stop,” said Elise, holding up a hand. Like before, her quiet certainty cut through the din. Cam realized with a start that she had been utterly silent this whole time, that she hadn’t spoken since she’d posed her initial question. A question she repeated now, looking right at him as she spoke. “Do you love her? I don’t really give a shit about the past, or intentions, or fears. That’s the only question that matters, so I’m going to ask it again. Do. You. Love. Her?”
He was so tired. Tired of fighting. He was a soldier, but he was a defeated one. He spoke quietly, but the single syllable was a roaring river in his ears. “Yes.”
“So what the hell are you still doing here?”
“What am I supposed to do? Run after her and tell her I made a mistake? That I’m sorry I publicly humiliated her?” Even as he spoke, though, something heavy and unfamiliar gathered in his gut. It was like that big shove from his brother had jarred all the fear out of his body. And this thing he was left with? He was pretty sure it was hope, though he would have expected hope to be light like a feather, capable of taking flight, not cumbersome and sick-making. But the weight of their arguments, as they started to make a twisted kind of sense, was actually staggering. “Tell her I’m sorry? Those are just words. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all. Intentions don’t matter. Words don’t matter. Not with me anyway. My actions have spoken for themselves.” It was by his actions he’d been damned. It was because of his actions that he didn’t deserve Jane.
“So don’t tell her you’re sorry,” said Elise calmly. “Don’t tell her how you feel. Show her.”
Show her.
Elise might as well have slapped him. He sucked in a breath.
Show her.
Could he…do that?
“Yes,” Gia said, her calm voice all the more potent because she’d spent the last several minutes yelling. “You think you don’t deserve Jane, and God knows I’m inclined to agree with you. But shouldn’t you let her make that decision? You say you love her? Then have some goddamned respect. Don’t assume you know what she wants. So man the fuck up, Cameron, and show her how you feel.”
“How?” He allowed the single syllable to fall from his lips because…Dear God, because he was finally defeated, convicted at his own trial. Either that or he was insane, infected by this hope virus, a fast-acting poison that was attacking all his systems at once.
“I don’t know,” said Elise. “But it has to be big. I don’t think more words are going to work on Jane. She lives with words all day long.”
She was right. Jane felt things through her stories—they’d just been talking about that. And what had she been doing tonight but trying to break free? To live her own stories, not just tell them, despite the fact that it was hard for her, terrifying even. That’s why she was so brave. Feeling things was hard.
Something he had said to Jane back at the CN Tower floated into his consciousness. He’d said it to her before jumping onto the glass floor, and then a little later she’d said it back to him before jumping off the freaking building.