Things You Save in a Fire(21)

“It’s not your fault,” I said, but there was that anger again, swirling itself into the mix. It kind of was her fault. She had been the first person to show me how terrible love could be.

The first, but certainly not the last.

She nodded now, like she’d figured something out. “You were fifteen when I moved out—”

“Sixteen,” I corrected again. “It was my sixteenth birthday, the night you left.”

Who does that, by the way? Who leaves her husband—her family—on her daughter’s birthday? One of the great unanswered questions of my life, but I wasn’t asking it now. We’d be here all night.

“You were so infatuated with that boy you liked. What was his name? Hank? Harold?”

“No one in my generation is named Harold,” I said. “It’s like asking if his name was Egbert.”

She was squinting at me now, like she had me cornered. She snapped her fingers at me. “What was his name, though?”

I sighed. We had to do this? Right now? “His name,” I said, ready to get it over with, “was Heath Thompson.”

Saying it released a funny, acidic sting in my chest. The second person who had ruined love for me. Also on my sixteenth birthday, as luck would have it, on the very same night in a spectacular one-two punch of abandonment. My sixteenth birthday. The night I’d spent pretty much the rest of my life trying to recover from.

She barely even remembered it.

But I was not—not—going to get into that. I glanced up the stairs like I was late for an appointment or something.

“You were in love with him. I could tell. You doodled his name constantly.”

I held very still.

She pointed at me like she was winning, like we were reminiscing about something pleasant. “I thought you were going to give yourself carpal tunnel.”

“That wasn’t love,” I said, totally poker-faced. “That was delusion.”

But she looked pleased with herself, like we were really getting somewhere. “Whatever happened with him?”

I took a second to marvel at the question.

I knew, of course, that there was no way she could be aware of “whatever happened” with Heath Thompson. I never told her. I never told anyone. In fairness, I couldn’t resent her for that. But something about the chitchatty tone of her voice as she asked about it, like she was just getting the update on some friend’s vacation plans or something—maybe even the idea that she could just not know, could have spent the past ten years obliviously making tea and watering hydrangea beds in this stupidly cute town—that, suddenly, really pissed me off.

I looked at her, so polite and friendly in that goofy calico eye patch.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing ever happened with him.”

She responded slowly, like she somehow knew I was lying. “Oh,” she said. “That’s too bad.”

“Not really,” I said. “He turned out to be a dick.”

The language made her blink. “Did he?” she said.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of mimicking a normal conversation—until I realized I was shaking. Not trembling, the way your fingers do when it’s cold, but rumbling deep inside my core, as if my emotions were colliding with each other in plate tectonics.

Could she tell?

I wasn’t waiting to find out. “I really do have a lot of work to do,” I said then, taking another step up. The stair squeaked.

She read my expression, and my voice, and my urgency, and I could see her mentally back off. She’d gone too far, she suddenly realized. Tried too hard. Violated the essential rule of human relations that if you chase too hard, everyone eventually runs away. “Of course,” she said, taking a step backwards. “Not tonight. To be continued.”

“Or not,” I said.

She saw her mistake. In trying to pull me closer, she’d pushed me away. She met my eyes one last time and gave a sad smile. “Now I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

I’d already turned away. I paused and looked over. “What work?”

“Getting you to change your mind about love.”

I shrugged, like I was sorry to break it to her. “I’ll never change my mind,” I said. “I know too much.”

“Maybe you don’t know enough.”

Why wouldn’t she just let me go upstairs? I let the irritation in my voice leak out. “Just look around at the world—at the lonely and the cheated on. The violent. The abandoned. I know exactly what people do to each other. I’ve seen enough ruined lives to last forever.”

“None of that is what I’m talking about,” she said. “None of that is love.”

“There’s conquest, and there’s status, and there’s porn. Love is something girls invented so they could feel better about it.”

I’d shocked her. Good. “If that’s what you truly believe,” she said, “then I feel so sad for you.”

“I feel sad for all the women out there dragging their boyfriends to Bed Bath & Beyond and making them shop for throw pillows. They want the fantasy more than they want the truth.”

“What’s the truth?” she challenged.

“The truth is that love doesn’t exist.”