Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 62 of 115

The next Friday, Kiersten came at dusk again. She sat on the same step, an arm's length from Eduardo. She opened his ledger and began to read. But Eduardo did not want to talk about the ledger. He had spent the week deciding to do the hardest thing. He wanted to say the true reason he had hurt her. Not the acts. The thing under the acts. He felt the old urge rise. Ask her a question first. Steer the talk. Make her respond to him, so he held the wheel. He had done it in every talk they ever had. He closed the ledger with one hand instead. "Can I say something," he asked. "Not to fix anything. Just to tell you." Kiersten set the book down. "Say it." Eduardo looked at his rebuilt porch. Once it had sagged and cracked, like the man he had been. "I hurt you because I was scared," he said. "Not scared of you. Scared of needing you. My father called that soft. I learned soft was dangerous." He stopped. The old habit told him to watch her face and adjust. He kept his eyes on the yard. "So when you loved me, it scared me," he said. "I made you into a liar so I could push you off. If you were dirty, I didn't have to trust you. I didn't have to feel small." Kiersten said nothing. He wanted to fill the silence, to steer her toward comfort. He let it sit. "That's the whole of it," Eduardo said. "I used you to hide from myself. You were never the problem. I was." A long quiet held between them. A cart passed on the road. Neither of them looked at it. "You just told me the truth," Kiersten said. "You didn't ask me a single thing first." Eduardo turned to her. "No." "Every other time, you started with a question," she said. "You'd trap me in it. Then you'd win." She studied him. "You didn't do that." "I noticed I wanted to," he said. "I put it down." Kiersten breathed out slow. Her shoulders dropped for the first time in weeks. "That's the man I couldn't reach before," she said. "He never came to the door." "He's here now," Eduardo said. "Late." "Late is still here." She picked up the ledger, but she did not open it. She held it in her lap. "I came scared you'd steer me again. You didn't." They sat until the porch light was the only light left. When she stood, she did not warn him away. "Wednesday," she said. "Come Wednesday too." Eduardo watched her walk into the dark. He had spoken plain, with no wheel in his hands. For the first time, she had asked him to come sooner, not later. The door she had bolted shut had opened a crack. Now he had to prove he could keep walking through it clean.