to, he heard a rattling sound and they were all staring at him and – holy hell – the rattling was coming from him. His hands shook against the table like a hundred little earthquakes. He closed his hands into fists and suppressed the shakes immediately.
“Are you okay, Daddy?” Penny whispered concernedly.
When Thames didn’t answer straightaway, Charlotte stood up. “He’s okay, Penny. Come wash up. We’ll go over your homework and then bath time.”
Instead of arguing like she would have done any other time, Penny sensed Charlotte’s urgency and went without protest. Charlotte squeezed his shoulder in passing, and he felt so thankful right then to have her.
Jem smiled warmly at Thames once they left. “You okay?”
Thames nodded once. “Sometimes I forget where I am.”
“Of course. All of this is fresh.”
“I don’t know if it’s that.” Thames took a moment, searching for words. “I think…this is how I’ll be from here on out, Jem. I think…I’ll always feel outside myself.”
Jem furrowed his brow. “How so?”
“I don’t know how to act.”
“It takes time.”
Thames didn’t respond. There was nothing to say. Jem didn’t understand what this felt like. He didn’t know what imprisonment did to someone. The depths of helplessness he’d felt had a scarring effect.
“You’ll be yourself in no time,” Jem went on to say, sounding certain. “Not saying this hasn’t changed you or anything, but…I think the old you is in there.”
“The old me? Nah, I was a persona. I picked a character and played my part. It was easier that way, to bury the old shit, to forget I had a list as long as my arm of shit I suppressed. I played the part because it fed the ego in me and made me pretend I was stronger than I really was. I…” Thames paused, reflecting solemnly before admitting, “I don’t think I’ve felt the old me since I was ten, Jem.”
That stopped Jem cold in his tracks. He stared hollowly at Thames now, his eyes dimming with understanding. A heavy silence filled the air around them, one that Jem ultimately broke.
“Isn’t it interesting what trauma can do to the mind?” he spoke softly. “For me, it was the moment I lost Addison. For Charlotte, it was the moment you beat Billy’s head to the ground. For Dom, it was the moment he got arrested for something he didn’t do. For you…it was feeling responsible for what happened to Locke.”
“And for Locke,” Thames continued, “it was what was done to him, feet from us, unbeknownst to us.”
Jem blinked hard, irritated. “You know, Locke is doing plenty fine for himself, Thames.”
“I understand –”
“What happened fucking happened, alright?”
“It fucked me up,” Thames explained hastily. “I didn’t understand it until I spent nights thinking it over. After that day I put up walls around me, Jem. I had to be the toughest fucker around. I had to inflict pain just so I didn’t think of the pain that little boy went through when he was in that hole –”
“It wasn’t your fault what happened to him,” Jem cut in sharply, eyes suddenly rimmed red. “You don’t get to carry that fucking guilt, man. It ain’t your guilt to carry.”
“And Dominic –”
“We will make it up to Dominic –”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because there’s nothing we can do about it from here, Conor.” Jem looked sternly at Thames now. “If we dwell, we might as well be stuck in there with him. We gotta live out here. You’ve got your daughter and your girlfriend and a second chance and you’re not going to move forward if you keep putting yourself back there in that cell with him, or even in that hole with Locke.”
Thames stared steadily at Jem now, hardly blinking as he studied his best friend. “Can I ask you something?” he said just then.
Jem nodded cautiously.
“You keep telling me we’ll make it up to Dom, but you never say the same thing about Locke.”
“He shut me out when you left for prison.”
“Funny, Dom said the same thing, but about him. He said he couldn’t understand why Locke never treated me differently.”
Jem considered that, thinking for several moments. “Yeah, well, that’s true, isn’t it?”
“But why?”
“I don’t know.” Jem shrugged, looking lost. “But…you were like glue to our friendship, Thames. When you left, that glue came undone and Locke and I haven’t meshed since.”
“Surely you can bridge that gap.”
Jem wouldn’t meet his eye. “It isn’t that I don’t want to. It’s that I can’t, Conor.” With a hard swallow, he repeated softly, “I