Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 89 of 115

The next morning Eduardo knocked at the door of her room. She let him in as a guest. He sat on the stone floor and looked at the plants she had placed. Through the window he saw the old house beside it. The sagging roof. The porch where he had once sat alone with his rage. The bright new room only made the old house look worse. "This place still carries it," he said. "Every board. My father's belt was in that closet. The nights I drank. The things I said to you here." Kiersten set her brush down. "You can't scrub a wall clean of that." "No." He looked at his hands. "I keep waiting to feel home in it. I don't. I feel the old man watching me from every corner." She was quiet. Then she stood and walked to the window. "Then stop trying to fix a grave." "What do you mean?" "This house is yours. Your father's. Your running. Your shame." She turned to face him. "None of it is mine. I'm living inside your old life." Eduardo felt the familiar urge to defend the place. He had bled for it. Eight years away, then a year of nails and paint. He set the urge down. "You're right," he said. "I built the whole thing around what I was fixing. Not around us." "I don't want to patch your past," Kiersten said. "I want to build something that's ours from the ground." He stood slowly. The thought scared him more than any confession. Leaving the house meant leaving the proof of his change. "A new house," he said, testing the words. "Both of ours. Nothing of his in it." "A home we choose," she said. "Not one you're repairing to prove something." Eduardo walked to the window and stood beside her. He pictured a house with no closet of bottles. No porch soaked in old anger. A place where neither of them had to step around a memory. "I'd have to let this one go," he said. "The deed. The land I fought the county for." "You'd have to let the fight go," Kiersten said. "That's harder for you than the land." He knew she was right. He breathed. He chose. "Then we build one. Together. You decide as much as I do. Every wall." Kiersten opened her locket. The green leaf lay flat inside. "I'll put the new house in here too," she said. "When it stands." Eduardo looked at the old house one last time through her window. For years he had tried to make it a home. He saw now it could only be a monument. "I'll ask the town for help," he said. "And I'll ask you first what you want. Before I lift a single board." Kiersten took his hand. It was the first thing they had decided as equals. The old house would stand empty. The new one did not exist yet. But they had chosen it together.