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I wake up hours later, the room dark and the sun long past setting. My eyes feel swollen and there’s an ache deep in my chest. I look over to see Owen on his back, his brow furrowed as he sleeps.
What was floating through his mind during my epic breakdown? Maybe he’s thinking that I’m more than he bargained for. Maybe he’s thinking Jack should be glad I let him off the hook. Maybe he’s wishing this trip was over already. I know I am.
Telling the truth sucks.
He’s awake when I come back in from the bathroom. “I fell asleep with this on,” he says as he rests his prosthetic on the chair, “and I really shouldn’t.” When I don’t say anything, he asks “Are you ok?”
“Aside from feeling massively embarrassed and uncomfortable? Yeah, I guess I’m ok.”
“Can you pretend that you and me, that we’re just friends? Can you trust in the idea that I won’t judge you no matter what you tell me? I can’t imagine holding something like that in for such a long time. It must hurt.”
“This hurts worse.”
“You said you’ve been lying for years but I don’t see it that way.”
“How?”
“To lie is to deceive someone on purpose. Who have you hurt besides yourself? You made a choice to bottle something painful up inside. It’s entirely different.”
“I paste a smile on my face every day. That smile is a lie. I have friends who have no idea who I am and don’t know the single most important thing about me. My family doesn’t know. I mean, I never told Jack and I was with him for years.”
“Why didn’t you tell Jack?”
I flop back down on my pillow and he gets back into bed leaving the space I need between us. “I don’t know. I tried a few times but it never felt right. When we broke up he accused me of being in love with a ghost. I never told him much about Damien but he found some pictures, and he hated that I looked so happy in them. I never gave him the chance to knowthatgirl. Jack should hate me. I wasted his time, I accepted his ring, and I never...Never once did I let him in.”
“Sienna defended him that night when I called him an ass.”
I’m confused for a moment. “At that faculty thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Sienna’s good-hearted, and I think she can see that Jack has always been knocking a locked door. I think deep down he wanted to make me jealous that night.” I let out a cheerless laugh. “He wanted me to react, to show some emotion. And he was massively disappointed when I simply didn’t care.”
“You didn’t? I wanted to slap the shit out of him.”
“I was relieved more than anything else. He gave me the out I was looking for. So that makes me a liaranda coward.”
“You’re neither.”
“I hope he’s with that grad assistant now.”
I laugh when he says, “Me too.” I look over to see him smiling at me. “I don’t want him sniffing around you anymore.”
“Oh,” I drag my finger back and forth between us, “you still want this? Even now that you know I’m a hot mess?”
“Yeah, Grace,” his smile drops. “I want this.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Owen
Talk about a deep dive. That was the most intense getting to know you experience I’ve ever had, and that’s saying a lot given the near-death experiences I’ve had in the company of people who were little more than strangers to me.
Grace is still shaky when we finally get up sometime around noon. We stayed up until dawn talking. She told me all about Damien, about finding out she was pregnant not long after he left, and then finding out he was dead all those months when she thought he’d abandoned her. My heart broke alongside hers when she told me about delivering the baby alone, twenty years old and scared out of her mind, and again when she told me about handing her baby over to the social worker, never to see her again.
I noticed the tattoo on the nape of her neck the other night in bed, but didn’t bring it up. There was a date etched underneath the small bird, figured it was something personal and important to Grace. I figured right.
After she drifted off I stared up at the ceiling thinking about what she told me. I pictured the little tuft of black hair on her baby’s head. Grace never knew babies were born with any hair, so she found herself running her fingers through it, amazed. She’s called her Birdie since then, her little blackbird.
