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“You would pick that right now, wouldn’t you?” he teases.
“If you don’t want to talk aboutit—”
“Tuus mors, mea vita,” he says. “Latin for ‘your death, my life.’”
His mother.
I was right.
This is about his mother.
My heart bleeds for the young man who lost a parent and so very brutally. “What does it mean to you, Eric?”
“It’s meant a lot of things to me at different times in my life, but ultimately ‘kill or be killed’ is the meaning it’s taken on in recent years. It’s about survival.”
Maybe I was wrong, I think. Maybe it wasn’t about his mother at all. “Did you get it when you were in the Navy?” I ask.
“No. You can’t tell now, since it’s surrounded by the rest of my ink, but it was one of my first tattoos. I got it after my mother committed suicide.” He glances skyward and seems to struggle with what he’s about to say before he fixes me in a turbulent stare. “My mother wrote those words to me in her suicide note.My death. Your life.”
Emotion balls in my throat. “Oh God. I’m sorry I chose that tattoo.”
“I’m not,” he says, squeezing my hand. “You want to know me, you have to know her and how she affected who I am. Harper, I protect myself but I also protect those I care about, the way she did me. She made the ultimate sacrifice for me. When another person would have fought for a cure to cancer, for more time on Earth, she fought for me. The way I’m fighting for you. The way I’mgoingto fight for you.” The plane quakes and then immediately enters calmer air once more. The plane is steady, the flying smooth, but I’m in knots. His mother died. He has no real family left, but I was carrying his child. I don’t know what that means to him but it meant, itmeans, so very much to me. It’s time to talk. We have to have this conversation no matter what the outcome. We have to talk about the child we lost.
Chapter forty-seven
Harper
“Ineed you to know that I would have called you if I hadn’t miscarried. I swear to you, I would have, but what was the point once—once I lost the baby?” I choke up and try to turn away, but my seat is locked and Eric is holding my legs.
I look down at my lap, at our hands, and Eric catches my face, forcing my eyes to his. “Tell me. Tell me everything. Forget you said anything on my voicemail. I want to hear it again.”
“What did Isaac tell you?”
“It doesn’t matter what Isaac told me. It matters what you tell me.”
“Because I didn’t tell you when it happened?”
“You told me why. I understand why.”
“Mostly on voicemail, though. I didn’t know if you would believe the baby was yours, and it was. I hadn’t been with anyone else. And I thought you’d think I had some Kingston agenda for telling you when you could do nothing to change what happened.” The plane shudders a moment, as if warning me to stop now.
“I might have,” he admits. “I don’t like to believe that I would have, but I saw you on that stage with the family at the party, and I left believing you were one of them. And that means manipulative and self-serving actions. In my mind, at that point in my life, I left you before you burned me.”
“I know,” I whisper, my throat thick. “I know that. I knew that. That was why it just didn’t make sense to call you, but I wanted to. You were the only person who it might matter to like it did me. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“But Isaac knows because he was there when it happened,” he confirms.
“Yes.”
“Tell me,” he urges, a gentle but forceful push to his voice. “I wasn’t there then. Let me be here for you now.” He hesitates. “If you can.”
It’s as if a blade pierces me with emotions, but I beat the pain down, into that hollow place where I don’t feel all of it with such sharpness. “I will. You deserve to hear the story, but I want you to know that I was going to tell you. I almost told you back at my house, in my bedroom when we were—when you thought something was wrong—”
“The condom,” he supplies, following my lead. “You were thinking about this when I was putting on the condom.”
I nod. “Yes, then, and several times that night. God, how I wanted to just tell you, but we kept having visitors and problems come up. I couldn’t find just one good moment alone with you that felt like the right time to talk about this.”
“I’m here now.We’rehere now.”
