when the subject came up. But I found myself unable to move. My feet felt as weighed down as my shoulders always did when I let myself think about the past and the mistakes I'd made and the terrible consequences that had followed. I looked back at Lex and saw him rubbing his finger over the surface of the table.
He was nervous.
Nervous about asking the question in the first place or nervous about my response—I wasn't really sure which, but it didn't matter. I was crossing a line with him that I’d promised I'd never cross with anyone ever again. The whole reason I’d returned to Fisher Cove was so I could draw that line and make sure that everyone who'd once known me understood it wasn't to be crossed. That I was no longer the Gideon Callahan they'd watched grow up each summer year after year.
Lex’s finger began tapping more incessantly on the table but when he suddenly sat back, drawing his hand with him, I found myself reaching out to cover it with mine. He let out a little whisper of air but didn't say anything. Nor did he try to remove his hand.
"Because my daughter was diabetic."
Chapter Seven
Lex
One of the things I’d feared most about going blind was no longer being able to read a person's facial cues and therefore not being able to pick up on what it was they weren't saying. Less than fifteen minutes had passed since I'd confronted Gideon in the living room and accused him of intentionally keeping me in the dark.
On its surface, his statement about his daughter could have been taken the same way, because he’d provided so little information. But he’d done nothing to hide the raw pain in his voice as he spoke.
So I knew what the "was" part of his admission meant. He’d used past tense not because his daughter had gotten over the disease but because his daughter had been lost to him. And I didn't need to have my sight to know that the event had devastated him.
I didn't even consider asking him to confirm it or to tell me how he'd lost her. What I did do was turn my hand over beneath his so our palms were touching. I rotated my hand enough so I could link my fingers with his. "I'm sorry," I whispered in the softest of voices. He didn't react at first and I fully expected him to just pull away. I had no way of knowing if I was upsetting him further or offending him or making him uncomfortable. I could only hope it was none of those things.
But when the chair did scrape across the floor just a little, he didn't drop my hand and walk away. Instead, he gave it the smallest of squeezes and held it like that for a few seconds.
A million things happened in those few seconds. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I wasn't Lex the blind guy. I was just Lex, the guy who wanted to offer comfort to a fellow human being.
I was someone who understood loss and grief. I hated that it was something Gideon was going through, but it did make me feel a little less alone. And it reminded me that despite everything I'd been through, I was still here. I'd always lived with the philosophy of not taking life for granted, but sometimes I forgot. It was also a reminder that Gideon was, indeed, human. It hadn't been fair of me to unleash on him like I had. He'd just been a convenient target. I wished I could go back to that moment and do things differently. After all Gideon had done for me, it hadn't been right to use him as a scapegoat for my problems.
But most of all, I realized I was still capable of feeling all the same things I had before I'd gotten the diagnosis that my vision was beginning to fail and there was no coming back from it. I'd been so angry at the world that I'd thought it had changed who I really was. But sitting at that table holding Gideon's hand was proof that I could still feel. That I could still care.
I let Gideon decide the next step. He gave my hand one last squeeze and then got up, presumably to resume cooking. I really wanted to just hug him and tell him that everything would be okay, even though I knew it