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He sets the ball down and grabs the water. “Not particularly.” Twisting the top off, he takes a drink and sets it on the coffee table. He watches me for a second and then pulls the afghan off the back of the couch and tosses it to me.
“What’s that for?”
“You look cold.”
Oh. Right. “Thank you.”
I pull the blanket to my chin, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. Now or never. Here goes nothing.
“When I close my eyes, I can smell the smoke, and it feels so real. At night I wake up coughing, and sometimes I wake up because I swear I can hear the boys screaming for me. Does that ever happen to you?”
“Every damn day.”
I hear Trevor shift around on the couch, but I don’t open my eyes. It feels safer here in the dark, my words bleeding from my mouth more freely than they have with anyone else.
“I made a rookie mistake—one I shouldn’t have made, and I swear this is my punishment. When I close my eyes, I see the scared faces of my students. Those boys’ screams echo through my head, the roar of the fire pulls me out of my sleep, and sometimes I find myself doing whatever I can to stay awake because the nightmares are too intense.”
“What
mistake, Claire?”
I peel my eyes open, wanting to look at him when I tell him what I did, hoping he’ll take on my pain and bear some of the weight—maybe help me understand it or work through it, or whatever the hell it is people in these situations do.
“I hesitated.”
20
Claire
Trevor is perched on the edge of the couch. His elbows rest on his knees, his hands dangling between his legs as he looks at me.
“What do you mean you hesitated?” he asks.
“I hesitated, putting not only my life at risk, but the lives of my students, and inadvertently you and Mikey’s lives as well.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat and tell Trevor everything that happened that day. I tell him about my goal of living up to my father’s standards, then about wavering when the alarms went off. I tell him how I forgot the boys were in the bathroom and every little detail in between, and when I’m done, my heart is racing, my palms are sweaty, and tears are threatening to spill from my eyes.
“Claire.” Trevor runs a hand along his jaw and shakes his head. “You did not make a mistake. You got your entire class out. You saved those boys’ lives.”
Damn it, that’s exactly what I don’t want to hear. I was stupid for thinking Trevor would look at this any differently than everyone else.
“You don’t understand, Trevor, and I don’t expect you to.”
He flinches as though my words slapped him across the face. “Are you serious? I don’t understand? Do you know how many times I’ve wondered if I’ve done the right thing? And I do this for a living, Claire. This is my job. Every single day, people depend on me to react quickly and make the right choice. Some days are great and I save a life, and other days I’m not so lucky. Do you know what that does to a man, wondering if something he did—a choice he made—could’ve been the deciding factor in someone’s life? I live with that guilt on a daily basis, Claire. So yes, I get it. I understand what you’re going through, probably better than anyone else ever will.”
Shit. Now I feel like an ass because he’s right. I can’t imagine how stressful his job must be. “How do you do it? This one thing has my head so messed up I can barely function, let alone concentrate. How do you deal with it day in and day out, over and over and over again?”
“It’s not easy,” he admits. “Some days are better than others. I’ve learned that in order to be happy and not let those moments consume me, I’ve got to check them at the door.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“I acknowledge what I’m feeling. I internalize it and accept it, and if it’s a really bad day, I let myself ponder it, and I get rip-roaring drunk, and then I let it go. Because if I don’t, it’ll consume me, and that’s the last thing I want.”
“It’s consuming me, Trevor. And you were right, it was stupid of me to go back into that building. I knew better—my dad taught me better than that. My whole life I’ve worked hard to make him proud, and I failed that night, Trevor. I failed him.”
My nose burns. My chin quivers. I drop it to my chest to try to hide the tears.
Trevor pulls me into his arms and holds me. He doesn’t whisper words of encouragement or inspiration, he simply offers me comfort in his warm, strong embrace. I open the floodgates and let it all out. I cry harder than I’ve ever cried. I cry for the pain I still feel from the loss of my father. I cry for Mom and the years she’s had to live without the love of her life. I cry for Milo and Mo and Rhett and Cooper. I cry because Trevor has to deal with this sort of thing every single day. I cry for Tara and Troy and Marcus and all of the kids in the building that day. But most of all, I cry for myself. I cry because I need to, because I have to purge this pain from my system so I can find some form of normalcy again.
