“Jacob?” she breathed, shocked and confused and throbbing with feeling.
“What?” He finally turned to meet her eyes. He’d said he hadn’t even had two full beers, but he looked oddly woozy. Not with it at all.
“What exactly are you saying?”
“I don’t even know.”
“If you felt that way, why did you leave me? Why didn’t you just come back?”
“I couldn’t.” He was staring into the distance again, almost like he was talking to himself.
“Why not? Tell me why.”
“Grandfather kicked me out.”
That was the last thing in the world she expected. Her voice squeaked. “What?”
“He kicked me out. He told me he wasn’t going to support me anymore. Wasn’t going to pay for college. That I was on my own.”
“He did not!”
Jacob raised his dark eyebrows in a semblance of dry irony.
“He really did? I can’t believe that. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I was a kid. I messed up. I was really hurt, and I messed up.”
Her eyes burned, and her throat ached, and her hands shook with feeling. For a moment Jacob looked like the sweet boy he used to be, and she could see how much his grandfather’s treatment had sliced into his soft heart. “I’m really sorry he did that.”
“Yeah. He’s sorry now too. Not that it changes anything.”
She was fighting back tears, so it took a minute before she could get the words out. “It changes a little. For me. To understand why you did what you did.”
He jerked his head back to peer at her, as if he were searching for something in her face. “Does it?”
“Y-yes. A little. Not everything. You still dumped me. You didn’t have to do that. I would have understood. We could have worked something out. You could have at least told me the truth before you left.”
He slumped back against the boulder and closed his eyes, like he was too exhausted to hold them open. “I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
He didn’t answer immediately. For a minute she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. Then he finally admitted, “I was hurt so badly that I... wasn’t thinking straight. I was afraid of being hurt even more. That you might reject me like my grandfather did if I wasn’t... I didn’t have the life and future you expected from me. I know that wasn’t fair to you. You’re way better than that. But I was bleeding. So I ran.”
The words rang true to her. She believed them. She could understand his state of mind back then. He’d just been a boy, and he’d felt like he lost everything.
It didn’t make it right, but she could see how it had happened.
“Did... did your grandfather apologize to you?”
“Yeah. He did.”
“Did you... make up with him?”
“As much as we can ever make up. You can’t take things back. You do what you do, and then you live with the consequences.”
Ria could see very clearly that he was speaking more about himself than he was about his grandfather. She reached over to put a gentle hand on his chest. “Thank you for telling me, Jacob.”
He stared down at her hand on his shirt for a long time. Finally she pulled it back and placed it carefully on her lap.
They sat in silence after that. Ria finished her beer, and Jacob finished his second one. He passed her another without comment and then popped the top off another bottle for him.
He was evidently planning to sit there until the six-pack was gone, and it didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world to Ria. At least the alcohol might dull a little of the confused ache the world had become.
They sat together as the sun lowered in the sky, the low light glinting off the water of the lake, the flashes sparking in sudden pops as the water moved.
“Is your grandfather okay?” she asked after a really long time.
“He’s worse today. I thought he was going to die, but he didn’t. Not yet.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “People die every day. And they usually leave things undone. Words unsaid. Relationships broken. Life doesn’t put itself together into neat story arcs that make sense to us.”
“But you said he apologized.”
“He did.”
“So at least you have that.”
Jacob turned his head in her direction, his eyes soft and slightly blurry on her face. “I guess.”
“That’s something, Jacob. Something you might not have had. Maybe it doesn’t matter that much to you now, but it will matter in the future. At least that won’t be left unsaid.”
He nodded jerkily, making a weird sound in his throat. “Yeah.” He made another one of those throaty sounds, like he was choking on emotion. “I’m sorry, Ria. I’m sorry. For what I did to you. I don’t want to leave that unsaid too.”
The tears that had been burning in her eyes for the past hour started to fall, streaming down her cheeks in a messy rush. “Thank you. For saying that. For telling me.”
He wrapped one arm around her and pulled her toward him so she could sob for a minute against his shirt. He murmured, “I should have told you a long time ago.”
Her tears didn’t last long, and as they dissipated, so did the angsty tension she’d been experiencing ever since she heard that Jacob was coming back to town. She lay against him for a few minutes, enjoying the relief, the comfort, the peace she hadn’t realized she was missing.
She could hear his heart beating in his chest. It was thumping loud. Fast. His arm was warm and strong around her. His fingers were idly playing with her loose hair.
Realizing she was still holding her beer loosely in one hand, she set it down on the ground securely so it
