In A Fix - Mary Calmes Page 0,84
not crashing anything, I promise you.”
She nodded, turning to face me. “Where the hell did you go? God,” she gritted out, frustrated, possibly verging on angry at me all over again, “do you know how hard it is for someone to disappear like you did? No social media, no address or phone number hits in a Google search, you were just…gone. It was years before I realized I wasn’t pissed off at you anymore, and longer still before I could admit that I still cared enough to want some answers from you, but by then it was too late. I finally had the resources to find you, but I was too deep into my assignment.”
“I moved to Chicago.”
Her face clenched up. “Why?”
“A change needed to be made.”
“That didn’t include me?”
What could I say that wouldn’t hurt her?
“You left everything and everyone.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “So I was collateral damage.”
It sounded so bad when she said it like that. “I guess,” I said lamely.
“No. There’s no guess. I was.”
“You were, yes.”
She was silent, studying me, staring at my face. “Did you ever regret that?”
I took a breath. “I put you out of my mind. I went straight to the police academy, so I was busy. No time to think.”
“And when you saw me there in the driveway?”
I crossed my arms, bracing for the attack. “I thought, ‘It’s sad that I missed seeing Ella become such a badass.’”
“Don’t suck up, it’s too late.”
“Is it?”
She sucked air in through her nose. “You hurt me.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me you’re fuckin’ sorry,” she snapped at me.
“You know I am.”
“Then say it,” she insisted, her gaze pinning me to the wall.
“I’m sorry,” I said adamantly. “I really am. If I had it to do again, I’d choose a different course where you were concerned.”
“We were close, Croy. I felt it, my friends knew it, and so did my family.”
Could that be right? Was I capable of being close to anyone back then? Of feeling true closeness? Was I now? Was I putting Dallas at risk? I’d been told I was trouble, that I was broken, that I was dangerous. If I fell in love with him, and then started to feel trapped or fell out of love with him, what would that do to him? It could happen, because I didn’t know anything about love. I had no example to go by. No one had ever loved me except my grandmother, but even that had been dutiful, familial, and we had seen each other so rarely. How could I hope to be a partner when I didn’t even know how to be a true friend?
“We were acquaintances,” I told her solemnly.
“No, idiot,” she said irritably. “We were friends. We still are friends.”
We were?
“God,” she growled again, exasperated. “I didn’t miss this part.”
“What part?”
“Of you being all in your head,” she explained. “You used to wonder if thinking was the same as feeling. Don’t you remember that? You’d say, ‘If I think I feel this way, does that make it real? Does that make it true?’”
“I know better now,” I told her.
“Oh?”
“When you’re young, you have all that time to study yourself and really do a number on your own psyche with the self-reflection.”
“Not all of us do that,” she reminded me. “We don’t all second-guess ourselves.”
“I just want to do the right thing as much as possible,” I said defensively.
“No, you don’t want to be wrong,” she countered, shooting me a look. “There’s a difference. You never want to be wrong, because then you never have to apologize.”
“That’s not––”
“Yes, it is,” she said implacably. “You think so hard, sometimes, that by the time you’re done thinking, whatever it was you were thinking about has passed you by.”
I shook my head.
She pointed down the hall, the way Dallas had gone. “I have no idea how you’re in a relationship, but I can only guess that you finally took a leap of faith for once in your life.”
“What? I’m so damaged that I could never be—”
“You’re not damaged. You’ve never been damaged. You just overthink because you don’t want to be wrong, and you don’t want to get hurt.”
“Well, you’re lucky I thought before I spoke this morning, because if I had blurted something out the moment I saw you, we would—”
“Fine. Thinking before speaking is good in crisis situations. How’s that?”
“Also good when arguing, so you don’t say something you’ll regret later.”
“Yes, true,” she agreed. “So I guess it’s the balance that’s important.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you can go ahead