Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 33 of 60

Eduardo climbed down from the siding at noon and sat on the porch step. The hammer hung from his hand. The house behind him still looked like the picture he had carried in his head for eight years — sagging roof, cracked boards, a door that hung wrong on its hinges. He had painted the front, but the sides still showed the rot. He set the hammer down and let himself think about her without flinching. He thought about the first time he called Kiersten a liar. He had known she was telling the truth. He said it anyway because it was easier than answering her question. He thought about the second time, and the tenth. Each time she cried, he had felt something small and mean move in him, and he had called it winning. He remembered the last night in her stone house. She had stood in the kitchen with her arms folded. He had told her she was doing this because she loved him. He had told her that if she let him stay, she would only be enabling him. He had said it like he was doing her a favor. He had meant it as a trap. He had wanted her to take him back one more time so he could prove her wrong about herself. She had not taken him back. She had opened the door and waited. He understood now what he had not understood then. He had taken her piece by piece for years. He took her trust first. Then her sleep. Then her friends, because she stopped calling them so she would not have to lie for him. Then her certainty about her own mind. By the end she had nothing left that belonged to her. She had to learn to love herself because he had spent every year teaching her not to. He put his face in his hands. He did not cry. He sat with it. He had wanted, for months, to be the man who fixed it. He had driven to her gate with a letter. He had asked a fortune teller and an angel and a guardian to sign him clean. He had wanted a witness who could tell her he was different now. He saw, sitting on the step, that the wanting was the same shape as the old cruelty. He was still trying to reach into her life and take something. He stood up. He walked inside and took the ledger with her name off the shelf. He did not burn it. He carried it to the closet and put it on the top shelf, behind the empty space where the belt had been. He shut the door. Then he went back outside and started on the rotted board at the corner of the house. It was hers to be free of him. The rest of the work was his.