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There’s nothing left of the house she lived in. Everything has gone. Smashed, burned, or broken. She feels numb; her brain can’t seem to catch up with what she’s seeing. She goes through to what was once the kitchen. Glass crunches under her feet.
“Jess.”
She turns, Griffin is standing behind her.
“Jess, there’s nothing for you here.”
She looks back at the room. The dining table is on its side, broken chairs stacked around it. She picks one up and stands it on its feet. But it looks worse that way, to see something the way it was, how it should have been.
She feels Griffin put his arm around her shoulders and pull her close to him. She realizes she’s crying, and wraps her arms around his waist, sniffing snotty tears into his black coat. After a moment she wipes her eyes with a bit of her sleeve.
“Fucking crying again,” she mutters. “Always fucking crying.”
He looks down at her, his eyes serious.
“You’ve every right to cry. You’ve lost your home. Your husband.”
“I’ll be okay. I’ve been through worse,” she replies. You’ve been through worse, she wants to say, but doesn’t.
“It doesn’t work like that, Jess. Ignoring grief doesn’t make it go away, as much as you’d like it to.”
She takes in a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “Patrick called this our forever home. But I never saw it that way.” She glances up at Griffin. “I’d never lived somewhere for more than two years before here. Not since I was a baby.”
“How come?”
“We moved a lot. From county to county. Because of me,” Jess says. “It started when they first took me into care. Because I couldn’t feel pain, I was constantly at the hospital, and doctors thought I was being abused. When I was five, they didn’t tell me what was going on—they just whisked me away to a children’s home.” Jess looks down at her hands. “I didn’t understand why. I thought I’d done something wrong. It took my parents a month to get me back.”
Jess sniffs, then blows her nose on her sleeve. “And then we moved up north. Fresh start. Except I was a nightmare. Got expelled from school after school for getting into fights. I’ve never played well with others.”
“I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
Jess glances at Griffin. He has a slight smile on his face.
“Patrick was the exception. He said he could fix me.”
There’s a pause. Jess hears rain dripping through the house.
“Perhaps you don’t need fixing,” Griffin says quietly. “Perhaps we’re all supposed to be broken, just a little.”
She allows him to guide her out of the house and into the Land Rover. They climb inside, and Griffin lights a cigarette.
“Griffin,” Jess says.
He looks at her, the cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“I found a photo. I know your wife was one of the victims.”
He turns away from her, taking a long drag, then blowing it out the window. He starts the engine.
“I’ll drop you at the garage. I need to go back to the station,” he says.
“Griffin?” Jess puts a hand on his arm, but he shrugs her off. “Tell me about her?” she asks softly.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
He puts the car in gear and drives away from the house with a screech of tires. Jess closes her eyes, cursing herself for mentioning it. That’s not the sort of relationship they have, she tells herself as they drive back to the apartment. She was stupid to think otherwise.
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