Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 86 of 115

Three days after Aurora drove off, Kiersten grew quiet. She still made the tea. She still read the Friday ledger. But something in her had pulled back, like a hand lifted off a rail. Eduardo noticed it over supper. She answered his questions with one word and looked at the door more than at him. That night she sat on the porch steps. The old house loomed behind her, its sagging roof and cracked walls patched but still weary. Eduardo came and stood near her, not too close. "You've gone somewhere," he said. "Aurora was one," Kiersten said. She didn't look up. "How many more are there?" The old Eduardo would have said none and smiled. He felt the lie rise and let it pass. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe more. People I used. People I lied to. I can't promise another car won't slow down." Kiersten's jaw tightened. "That's the fear. Not Aurora. The next one. And the next." She wrapped her hand around the locket. "I cried a whole night once. In the bathtub. Missing you. I knew the cycle. I knew I couldn't keep letting you cut me." Eduardo sat down on the step below her. "Tell me the rest." "I prayed that night," she said. "Not to you. To the man under you. The one you keep buried. I asked him to hear me." She finally looked at him. "I don't know if he did." Eduardo's throat went thick. He had spent years making her carry his lies. He would not make her carry the not-knowing too. "He heard you," he said. "I can't prove that with words. So I'll do this." He went inside and came back with the dark ledger, the one holding his worst confessions. He opened it on his knee. "Every name I can remember, I'll write here. Not when one shows up. Now. Before they come. So nothing arrives and surprises you." Kiersten watched his pen move. He wrote slow. Each name was a door he was closing in front of her instead of behind her. He did not soften them. He did not explain them away. When he finished, he handed her the book. "That's all of it. If I remember more, it goes in the same day. You'll never learn it from a stranger again." She read the page twice. Her shoulders came down. "You didn't wait for me to catch you." "No," Eduardo said. "I'm done making you the one who has to check." Kiersten closed the ledger and set it on her lap. The pulled-back thing in her settled. "Then I'm not scared of the road," she said. "I'm scared of silence. You just broke it." She leaned her shoulder against his, the first touch she'd offered in days. The weary house stood over them, patched and holding. Eduardo breathed. The fear that she would erode had an answer now, and the answer was telling her first.