“Get out of here,” he said. “And take your damned soup.”

“I’m not taking the soup,” I said.

“Well, I’m not frigging eating it.”

“Fine,” I said. “Pour it out! It’s homemade by my dying mother, you bitter old pain in the ass, but pour it out.”

“Get out of my house!”

“I’m going,” I said, packing up my bag.

“And take your forgiveness with you!”

“No way in hell. The forgiveness stays!”

“Leave. Right now.”

“I am,” I said. But instead of moving away, I stepped closer. “I’m leaving. But I’m taking you with me.”

DeStasio checked my expression to see if I meant it.

I did.

I expected him to fight me, but as I reached out my hand, all the fight just seemed to drain out of him. Like he’d been fighting way too hard for way too long, and right at that moment, he decided to surrender.

Was it okay, what he’d done to me? Or to Owen? Or to himself? Did an addiction excuse everything? Did losing his son, and then his wife, give him the right to violate all standards of human decency? Of course not.

But did I suddenly want to do everything in my power to make sure that I never let my own grief and rage and disappointment do the very same thing to me?

You bet.

“Come on,” I said, helping him up.

He didn’t resist. “Where are we going?”

“I think you know where we’re going,” I said.

He took a second to get steady on his feet. “You’re taking me to the captain, is that it? Or to the police?”

“Neither, old man,” I said, shaking my head. “I am taking you to rehab.”

Twenty-nine

I FINISHED THAT day feeling strong.

True, DeStasio wasn’t going to confess anything. True, I wasn’t getting my job back. Technically, other than the fact that DeStasio wasn’t dead, I hadn’t accomplished all that much by confronting him.

It didn’t matter. I was proud of myself. I was proud of how I’d handled it all. I’d brought him soup, and gone to check on him, and chosen, over and over, to be compassionate, and to be human, and to do the right thing—no matter if he deserved it or not.

I’d risen above my anger. It wasn’t all gone yet, but it didn’t have to be.

I’d forgiven him. Or tried, at least.

When I’d spoken the words, honestly, I’d been faking. I’d said them on principle, not expecting to feel them. I’d expected the feeling would only follow later. Possibly years later. If at all.

But saying the words had somehow sparked the feeling, too.

Words were powerful, I realized in a new way.

No denying it now.

I had told my story. I had put it into words, at last. For DeStasio, of all people—but you can’t have everything. He wasn’t the only person to witness that moment, anyway.

I was there.

Telling the story changed the story for me. Not what had happened—that, I could never change—but how I responded to it.

It was like I’d been averting my eyes from that memory for ten solid years, but I’d finally forced myself to look again. And what I saw, at twenty-six, was so different from what I remembered from when I was sixteen.

Even though nothing about the story had changed, I had changed.

I’d begun telling that story to DeStasio because of how I wanted him to feel. I wanted to force him to recognize how hurtful his actions had been. Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. What I know for sure is that I felt something, hearing the story—something I never would have expected to feel for that stupid, naïve girl I had been: compassion.

Looking back, I saw her—that teenage me—with different eyes. I saw her in the story as young, and trusting, and inexperienced—but not stupid. Not contemptible. Now, all these years later, she was someone I could root for, and understand, and hurt for. And in this crazy way, the fact that I could look, and listen, and care about her, and ache for her, and defend her—even if I couldn’t change anything at all—the fact that someone heard her, could stay in that moment with her and bear witness, meant that she wasn’t alone.

She wasn’t alone anymore.

She’d been so alone all these years, endlessly facing the worst moment of her life and completely abandoned by everyone. Even me.

All that changed when I told her story.

Now, she had me on her side—too little and too late, but right there at last, all the same.

Putting that long-unspoken night into words changed the memory. It was no longer some kind of poison gas that snaked around my consciousness, formless and uncontainable and lethal. Now it had words. Now it had a shape.

A beginning, a middle—and, most important, an end.

* * *

IT TAKES A lot out of you, confessing your darkest secret. I went home and slept like the dead.

And when morning came, something about me was reborn.

I lay in bed under a pattern of sunshine from my window and marveled at my capacity to do the impossible. I’d told the story of Heath Thompson. I’d told the whole soul-destroying story, and I’d lived to see the dawn. Of all the brave things I’d done in my life, that one was the bravest.

If I could do that, I could truly do anything.

And now I was going to the hospital to see the rookie, no matter what anybody said.

Just try to stop me.

But when I headed downstairs, I found that my mother’s house was full of firefighters.

Not just any firefighters, either. Station Two, C-shift. My crew.

They were doing chores.

Six-Pack and Case were in the kitchen, repairing my mother’s broken window. Tiny was on a ladder in the living room, replacing the lightbulbs in a ceiling fixture. And the captain was sipping coffee at the kitchen table with my mom, in her bathrobe.

“Oh, honey,” my mom said when she saw me. “You’re up.”

The captain turned, saw me, too, and stood up. “Morning, Hanwell.”

As soon as the guys heard him, they all called out, “Morning, Hanwell!”

I wasn’t sure what to make of them all. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story,” the captain said.

“They showed up here at seven forty-five and started fixing my broken window,” my mom said. “Then they asked me to make a list of every single honey-do I could think of for them, and they’ve been hard at work ever since.”

I looked at the captain like, What the hell?

“These guys,” my mom went on, chirpily, gesturing at Six-Pack and Case, “are going to repaint my garden fence. And this one”—she gestured at Tiny—“adjusted that broken gate latch out front, tightened the loose cabinet door, and fixed the leak behind the toilet.”

She looked pleased.

I frowned at the captain. “Why?”

He looked right at me. “By way of apology.”

“What are you apologizing for?” There were so many possibilities.

“DeStasio throwing a brick through that window, for starters,” the captain said, nodding at it.

I blinked. “You knew it was him?”

“I do now.”