was no going back.
He’d said it, and now his whole mind was full of flames.
Images of that night that he worked so hard to never, ever see.
But they came to him anyway. Awake or asleep. And pretty much the only time he could escape was when he was wielding a hammer, the motion and the sound of the metal hitting nails doing something to drive all thought out of his head.
And he often thought that if he could...if he could just never think. If he could be like an animal and move through life focusing on survival. Maybe, maybe it would be endurable.
But he couldn’t.
Because no matter how deep he tried to go back into nature. Back to nothing, he was still a man.
A fact well proven tonight.
Dammit but he was weak.
He had wanted her. So much. And then she’d been standing there, all wet and glorious, looking at him like he might have answers.
She was about to be very disappointed. Because he didn’t have an answer. Not a single one. To anything.
“I hate it,” he said.
He didn’t say what, because it was too many things. Maybe everything.
No, not everything. Not her.
She said nothing.
She didn’t press him to continue. Didn’t ask him to clarify. And for that he was grateful.
She just sat there. Still and steady and Iris.
This strange creature that had come into his life when he hadn’t wanted her to, hadn’t asked her to. And there she was. Holding a plate of cookies and demanding that he let parts of himself that had been asleep for a long time rejoin the world.
And so... Maybe she did deserve his story.
He’d never told anyone before.
Everyone he knew...they just knew.
It had been in the news.
And no one had ever made him talk about it. In fact, they had gone out of their way to never talk about it. There had been a whole lot of sorry. And then, other than his parents and Mallory, a push to try and bring him back into the real world.
As they called it.
But no. The real world for him was gray. That space where Mel and Emma didn’t exist anymore.
“I worked in the city and sometimes I worked late,” he said.
He was surprised how flat the words were. But there was something about that that made them easier to get out. Because there were whole boulders lodged in his chest, in his throat, and he didn’t know how he was supposed to speak around them. Again, he was met with her silence, and he was grateful for it. He knew it didn’t mean she wasn’t listening. Didn’t mean she didn’t want him to speak. It just meant she was going to let him do it at his own pace.
He didn’t know what that pace was.
The story of how his life had fallen apart could actually be distilled into two lines. Which seemed wrong. But taking a long time to tell it didn’t feel right either.
It hit him then that it would just always feel wrong. Always.
He would never be able to reconcile that moment in time. Would never be able to make it fit. Would never be able to... Put it in a place. It just was.
And it was wrong.
“I came home and the house was on fire,” he said, battling against the images in his mind. He was trying not to relive it. But it was damn near impossible.
To not see the flames glowing like hell as he had driven up his driveway. And he’d seen the lights, and he’d been sure... He’d been sure that they were out. That they had to be. Because it was this five million dollar damn house with every safety system known to man, and alarms that were supposed to go off and everything designed to have easy exits.
Everything had been thought of.
And he would never know for sure what had happened.
They’d told him it was smoke inhalation. Which was the kindest of scenarios, he knew.
And he was always afraid they were lying to him.
But that meant somehow there had been smoke and no alarms had gone off in time. But he couldn’t figure that out either. Nothing made sense. That was the bottom line. And they could investigate it and comb over the debris that was left of his life and try to give him answers, but none of the answers would ever be good enough.
None of them would change the outcome.
“I tried to go into the house. It took three people to stop me. When I