“I think about Jackson every day. He’s a piece of my heart.”
“Not him.”
Oh. It’s clear he’s expecting the truth. Do I want to give it to him? He was so hostile when he first arrived.
He taps my hand with two fingers. “I’ll keep it between the two of us. I don’t know why, but I need to know.”
A knot slowly crawls its way up my throat and lodges itself right in the middle.
“Please tell me,” he begs.
“He’s the biggest piece of my heart. Late at night, when there is nothing to hang on to, I think of him. He sits with me in the dark. Sometimes I wrap my blanket around myself and pretend it’s him.” I stop, realizing how crazy I sound.
Dirk sits quietly, unmoving. It makes me feel comfortable enough to continue, even though it scares me.
“For a long time, I sat in the pitch black of this place. I didn’t turn the lights on. I didn’t go outside. I was terrified they’d find me.” I glance up at the light fixture. “He was here with me through it all.” I sit up a little straighter, remembering how proud I was when I turned it on for the first time, eventually moving on to the other rooms. “Being here in the silence waslike being in a cocoon. Slowly I began to morph into something different, and even then, he never left my mind.”
He looks away from me as he mulls over what I’ve said.
“Everything is changing, and it’s making me itchy,” he admits.
“Well, that is one thing we have in common.”
It makes him laugh sadly. “I’ve been looking for someone to take my grief out on, and unfortunately Raffe took the brunt of it. I said some pretty horrible things to him yesterday.”
I stand up, holding my hand out to him. “How about a drink?”
“You don’t strike me as the drinking type,” he says, but he accepts my offer, taking my hand.
“Bill left a bottle of whiskey here. We each had a couple of drinks to celebrate the first time I left the house. We were saving the rest for my next goal, which was leaving the property. I was kind of a work in progress.”
Once in the kitchen, I open the cabinet and point to the bottle on the top shelf. Dirk gets it down, running his thumb over the label like a long-lost friend.
“He only drank the best,” he says quietly.
We take it outside and sit on the front porch. The tip of my finger points toward the path. “I can’t tell you how many days he stood with me at that front gate. He never got upset with me when I couldn’t do it. We just tried again the next time he was here.”
“So, you’ve never left?”
“I have.”
He shakes the bottle, confused.
“The first time I left was for his funeral.”
His eyebrows jerk in surprise, and he sits forward. “You were there?”
I nod shyly. “Rachel sent me a letter, letting me know. It was the one and only time she ever communicated with me, otherthan the letter I received in my mailbox simply letting me know she had passed.”
He looks at the bottle in his hands. “Well then, this has been a long time coming, hasn’t it?”
“I guess it has. I have to warn you, though. I’m a bit of a lightweight.”
Dirk pours each of us a glass, and then he holds his up. A ray of sun bursts from the trees, cutting into the amber liquid. “To getting past the gate.” He tips his glass toward me.
My eyes fill with tears, missing my friend. I tap my glass against his. “To Bill.”
He nods somberly. “To Bill.”
