Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 43 of 60

Eduardo pried a rotted board from the porch and set it aside. The house sat around him like a battered thing that had survived a long winter. Sagging roof. Cracked siding. Two windows patched with wood he had nailed up himself. He worked in the quiet the town had left him, and the quiet let a memory in he had spent all week pushing back. Kiersten in the kitchen of the old place. Her hands flat on the table. Him standing over her, arms crossed, asking again where she had been. She had told him the truth. He had told her she was an act. He sat down on the top step and let the pry bar rest across his knees. She had said it plain. She was not lying. She was not going to keep proving it. His cousin had said one word against her and Eduardo had built a case around that word for years. He had trusted the man who resented him over the woman who slept beside him. He had known. Part of him had always known. He remembered the last time she tried. She stood by the door with her shoes already on. She said one day he would meet with God, and God would tell him what she had been telling him. She said she was done proving. Her voice did not rise. That was the part that stayed. She had not begged. He had watched her go and told himself she was guilty because she left. Eduardo set the pry bar down on the boards. His hands were shaking. Not from anger. From seeing it clean, without the story he had wrapped around it for eight years. He had called her a liar to keep from calling himself one. He had made her small so he could feel tall in a house he was tearing down from the inside. He went inside and took the ledger of wrongs down from the shelf. He opened it to a blank page. He wrote one line. I believed a man who hated me over a woman who loved me. I knew. I chose it. He closed the book. He did not take it to Mother Angel. He did not drive to the school. He had learned that part already. The confession was not for her ears. It was for his own hand to write and his own eyes to read. He put the ledger back on the shelf and went out to the porch. The board he had pulled lay where he had left it. He measured a fresh one against the gap and started the cut. Something in him had been carrying her name like a debt he could pay. It was not a debt. It was a truth he owed himself. He had believed the wrong person on purpose. Naming it did not free her. It freed him to keep working without lying about why. He drove the first nail before the light went.