Breathe the Sky

by Michelle Hazen

  He’d seen the charges against Leroy. There wasn’t any way his brother was shaking that rap, but with his debt paid to the local gang, he’d be safe enough both in prison and once he got out—safe as Leroy could be, considering the trouble he stirred up everywhere he went.

  And with that, Jack was done.

  Instead of downloading a money transfer app, Jack had deleted his own number from Leroy’s phone. Thanks to his job, he had no permanent address, and Leroy didn’t know his email. He’d never be able to find him again.

  Leroy could only poison the new life Jack had built. Now, when they were both okay, was the time to make that clean break. He should have done it a decade ago, honestly, but he’d always thought his new life was a fluke, or luck. Had thought he was no different than his brother, deep down. But that wasn’t true. He’d worked hard to change his life, made his own choices that led to a good paycheck and comfortable life. Leroy’s choices had led them to sleeping under shelves of Cheesy Charlie’s dough with a matched set of black eyes.

  No matter what happened with Mari or the future, he was done letting Leroy’s choices fuck up his own.

  Jack broke the speed limit as he passed the lot full of cop cars behind the courthouse, and kept pushing it until he was all the way across the city and looking out onto open Nebraska prairie. Then he pulled up to a stop sign and let his foot sit heavy on the brake.

  A week after Jack left, Rod had called and said he couldn’t hold a foreman spot open for him when the project was ending so soon anyway. As of tomorrow, the job would be over, and Mari would disappear with it.

  It weighed on his mind that she’d never called back. It didn’t seem like her, as forgiving and even-tempered as she always was about everything. Also, would she really have changed her number just to avoid his calls?

  He stared at the red sign on the side of the road.

  He could still remember what it felt like when she looked at him. The way he could tell she liked him.

  Jack’s hand closed tighter over the steering wheel. That hadn’t been a lie, and one stupid argument didn’t erase it. There had to be some other reason she hadn’t called, and he was going to find out what.

  Maybe Mari was hesitating, too, not sure if he really wanted to talk to her when she hadn’t answered his voicemail right away. Hell, it took him some time to cool down from a good fight, so it wasn’t like she didn’t deserve the same. He’d been assuming she’d want to be done with a guy like him, but everything he’d been ashamed of led back to Leroy’s choices, not his own. He’d grown into a decent man, in spite of everything, and Mari had been the first to treat him like he was worth caring about.

  It had just taken him a little longer to believe the same.

  A horn blared behind him, and instead of continuing in the same direction, he took a hard left toward California. Back to Mari. By the time he got there, the job would be over and she’d be gone, sure. And her phone was shut off, okay.

  But in a great big world chock-full of people, they’d somehow stumbled into finding their perfect match in each other. There was no way, after all that, that they wouldn’t find their way back to each other—no matter how many lost phone numbers and state lines fell between them. It was just that simple, and he believed it with the kind of faith he used to reserve only for death, taxes, and hard luck.

  Because life, it turned out, wasn’t always cruel. Not even for a Wyatt.

  34

  Last Days and Second Chances

  Mari parked her truck in front of Rajni’s apartment. Checked her rearview and her side mirrors, then craned her head to scan the cars along the curb. There was a blue sedan she wasn’t sure she’d seen before, but when she checked the list she now kept in her glove box, the blue sedan was scrawled in near the bottom of the paper. Everything was normal.

  She popped the list back in her glove box and slammed it, then unlocked her doors and went around to the passenger side to retrieve the cookie sheet she’d had to use as a serving platter for her cake. The words “Happy Last Day!” had been eaten down to just “Ha” by Jack’s ravenous crew—well, Gideon’s crew now. She’d barely saved the piece she’d promised Rajni. First to go were the pieces with her piped-on depiction of a lattice tower. With her dollar-store decorating tools, it had come out more like the Eiffel Tower than a power line, but her linemen seemed more smug than offended by the comparison.

  The cookie sheet got juggled onto one hand as she fumbled with her keys and hurried up the sidewalk. The buttercream began to melt as soon as she took it out of the shade, and it’d be a puddle if she didn’t get inside quickly.

  A man’s voice spoke up behind her. “Mari?”

  Fear punched the center of her chest, and she whirled around to put her unprotected back to the locked door. The cookie sheet went flying, hit the browning grass of the yard, and cartwheeled. She barely heard the jangle of her keys dropping from her nerveless hand to the scorching concrete beneath her feet. She couldn’t hear, couldn’t smell, couldn’t think or breathe, because every cell in her body was focused on what she was seeing: her ex-husband’s face.

  Brad was thinner. Clean-shaven like he never used to bother with except on Sundays, and wearing a new shirt buttoned all the way to his throat, though he was already sweating through it at the armpits.

  He winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I planned to talk to you on the phone, see if you’d be okay with meeting up with me. Except at first I was afraid to say anything when you answered, in case I scared you off. And then after the last time, the number stopped working. I wanted to tell you, if you needed help with the phone bill to get it turned back on, I could give you the cash.” He bent down and flipped over the cookie sheet, scooped the cake back onto it despite the dirt and dead grass now matted into the top. He stood up and offered her the tray.

  Her arms didn’t feel like they were attached to her body, electricity racking all her nerves in a soundless shriek of DANGER DANGER DANGER. She did not take the tray.

  Brad started to fidget, wiping his hand along the seam of his pants and leaving a long streak of blue frosting and sandy soil. He’d always done that, wiped his hands only along the seam as if that would hide the stains. She remembered the sshht of thousands of sprays of stain remover, scrubbing the fabric against itself to get the stains out of his pants. When her hands were bruised or her fingers broken, it had been so hard to grip the fabric hard enough to rub.

  “You didn’t come back to the motel you were staying at,” he said, his voice slower and softer than she remembered, as if he was worried he’d startle her into fleeing. “I thought the PI was wrong about what you were driving, or I’d have found your new place sooner.” He smiled, a little lopsided. “You always hated pickups. Said they were hard to park.”

  What kind of private investigator didn’t check for restraining orders when they were hired to find someone? She wished she could scream at him, whoever he was, rip away his stupid investigator’s license, and throw the pieces back in his face.

  Taking her shocked silence as assent, Brad came closer, and all her muscles balled tight.

  Maybe she should take the cookie sheet from him. It was light, but she could use it as a weapon. Smash it into his face to blind him or shove the edge into his Adam’s apple. She wasn’t allowed to carry weapons on the construction site, and she was safe enough with the crew around her, so her borrowed pistol was locked out of reach inside the apartment. The restraining order wouldn’t protect her. It only allowed her to press charges more easily once he’d done his worst.

  She had no idea when Rajni would be home. It was the last day on the project, and all the crews were doing different mop-up tasks, so there wasn’t an official clocking-out time. Organizationally, things had gotten more than a little chaotic since Rod had been fired for killing that tortoise to frame her.

  She shifted her weight toward her truck, preparing to ma
ke a run for it.

  Brad raised his free hand, palm out. “Hey. Look, you’ve got every right to be nervous, but I’m not here to hurt you, I swear. We can go somewhere more public to talk, if that would make you more comfortable. That’s what I’d planned on in the beginning, before your phone got shut off.” His eyes narrowed, studying her. “It did get shut off, right? Or did you shut it off?”

  Her breath caught in her throat. It sounded like a question, but it echoed in her mind with the snap of a trap. He’d ask these things, all innocent and supportive sounding, but if she admitted she’d done it to get away from him, he’d be hurt. The hurt would twist to anger, and the anger would break her bones.

  Brad shook his head. “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business. I didn’t come here to interrupt your new life. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. For everything, all those years.” He swallowed. “For breaking the promise I made when I asked you to marry me, that I’d never be like our messed-up dads.”

  A different kind of pain bit into her, and she hated it twice as much. She snatched the cookie sheet from him, swooped up her keys, and wished for the thousandth time that Jack hadn’t taken off after their argument.

  She couldn’t hit hard enough to punch Brad’s face the way it deserved to be punched, but Jack could.

  “You owe me that apology,” she said fiercely, recklessly. “Because you lied, Brad.” Her voice cracked and she nearly yelled what came next because she hated so much that he could still affect her. “When you promised you’d keep me safe, you lied your ass off.”

  His eyes glistened, shiny suddenly with tears. “I know,” he whispered. “I wanted to be better, and I messed up over and over again. You deserved better than that, Mari-baby.”

  She twitched at the old nickname. He hadn’t called her that since she was in her twenties. She looked away and scoffed, her nails scraping metallically over the baking sheet when her hand tightened.

  “I’ve heard it all before. ‘I’m sorry, I’ll change, everything will be different.’ Well, guess what? Everything is different, because you’re finally out of my life. Now you can leave, or I’ll call the police and my friend with a very large gun who lives here and my two friends with large biceps who live down the street.” She’d never threatened him before, not ever, but instead of fresh fear, all she felt was strength welling up through her.

  She’d faced off with Rod in his own office and she’d won. She was done crumbling in the face of a man’s fury. Maybe it was all the sleepless nights, trying not to miss Jack. Maybe it was the empty feeling in the pit of her stomach from the job ending that was making her reckless, but she just didn’t care anymore if Brad put her in the hospital for standing up to him. Right now, all she wanted was to able to look at herself in the mirror without shame.

  But instead of the familiar flare of anger, his face stayed embarrassed. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me, not at first. That’s why I brought proof.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of folded-over slips of paper. He held them out, but she just glared at him.

  “Receipts,” he said. “From my therapist. A different receipt for every week I’ve attended. Over a year now. There’s . . . there’s been a lot to work through, and it hasn’t been fun, but I’ve done it. For you. Mari, I never realized how empty my life was without you. I hate what I did to you, and I want our life back. But different this time, better.”

  She glanced down, curious if he’d tried to forge the receipts. They were signed, though, with a signature that tilted left when his always scrawled right. Printed with an official-looking logo and a name. She leaned in just a little to see. Steven Partridge, PhD.

  She nearly laughed. Of course it was a man. He’d never respect a female psychologist.

  “Anger management classes, too,” he persisted. “Every Tuesday night at the Methodist church. I graduated the program after six months, but I went back for another round because I figured, more couldn’t hurt, right?” He took a step closer. “I could have tracked you down months ago. But I wanted to wait until I was sure the therapy was going to help. I’m sober, too, got my six-month chip, and both my sponsor and my anger management coach said you can call them to verify. I didn’t want to come to you until I had proof. Listen, it wasn’t all bad. Remember when we took that trip to the beach and made love so long that we missed dinner and all the restaurants were closed?”

  He smiled, and it made him look young again, like the teenager who used to sneak in her window late at night just to kiss her.

  “And you made us a picnic from candy bars and one sad little orange from a gas station that you squeezed over the candy bars to make them orange chocolate. Remember? Or when you had the flu and I tried to make you chicken soup from scratch and gave you food poisoning on top of the flu.” He grimaced. “Actually, never mind that. Don’t remember my terrible cooking.” He patted his waistline. “I’ve been meaning to start working out again, too, but I’ve already lost plenty of weight just from eating my own cooking.” He let out a small, tentative laugh, but she didn’t join in.

  She remembered that flu, how he’d carried her to the car to get to the hospital for an IV, because she’d been so sick. But even so, they’d laughed and laughed about his horrible chicken soup.

  She tilted her chin up, really looking at him for the first time since he got here. He did look different. Tired, skinnier. More earnest. No trace of the anger that he’d always carried around like a thick cloud riding on his back. He had changed.

  She knew it all in a second, like a shift deep in her gut. No one had known him longer than she had. No one, not even her parents, had spent as many years by her side as he had. She knew something was different this time, not because of the therapy receipts or the sobriety chip, but because she knew Brad.

  All she had to do was nod her head, and everything would be easy again. She wouldn’t have to live every day under the scalding desert sun, sweating half to death when she tried to sleep in her truck when it was still 99 degrees at midnight. And he’d fought for her. Hard enough to track her across half the country even after not seeing her for years.

  She could go back to their little ranch house with the blue bistro set on the back patio. For as much as Jack seemed to occupy her every thought, she hadn’t heard from him in two weeks, and she didn’t know if he was even still in California. He’d disappeared like a dream she’d had about the kind of man she would want if wishes weren’t as fickle as fate.

  But Brad was real. He was right here and he’d always take her back.

  He’d been quiet for a long time, watching her think, but now he spoke. At just the right moment, because he knew all her expressions as well as his own. “Come home,” he whispered, and it was his voice that put her over the edge.

  It wasn’t the right voice. Wasn’t that gravelly sweet Alabama drawl she’d give anything to hear again.

  She stepped back. “That was never my home. And I’m happier here.” She gestured to the expanse of desert, stretching out beyond the spare few houses.

  Hurt flashed in his face. “I know you’re angry, but—”

  “If you’d really changed, you wouldn’t have followed me,” she interrupted. She hadn’t interrupted him in probably twenty years. Had never been so stupid, even with her lawyer at her side during the divorce proceedings. “After I disappeared to get away from you, any decent person would have known that was THE END in capital letters.”

  Jack’s absence ached like a phantom limb. How many times had she debated calling him? But even when her resolve wavered, the facts remained. He was gone, and that was his choice. He hadn’t chosen her.

  She straightened, and focused on the man in front of her.

  “I’m glad you’re getting help, I am. Any woman in your future deserves that much from you. But whatever kind of better man you want to turn yourself into, you’re going to have to do it alone. You’ve used up all
your second chances with me.”

  She turned her back on him, the fear returning to thrill coldly up her spine at the vulnerability. But she needed this moment, needed them both to see she could still be the strong, new version of herself even when her past had found her.

  “You lied, too.”

  She left her keys dangling from the apartment lock and turned around. “Oh, really?”

  “You said if I signed the divorce papers, you’d give me another chance. But you took off instead, and now, you won’t even have a damn coffee with me. Won’t give me five minutes of your fucking precious time after I’ve spent months, hell, years doing everything you ever wanted to make myself better for you.” His sneer didn’t quite cover the little-boy hurt in his eyes.

  “Yeah, I lied. I would have said anything to get you to sign those papers. But seriously, Brad, what made you believe a woman who promised to give you another chance only if you’d give her a divorce?” She arched an eyebrow.

  “What makes you so much better than me, huh?” He jerked a long step closer to her. “You’ve made mistakes, too, Mari. I’m doing all the apologizing here, making all the amends, and you just give me that holier-than-thou look like you’ve never so much as forgotten to put a dollar in the collection plate on Sundays.”

  In chapter eleven of the book that Jack had given her, it said that men like Brad often looked for victims who were used to being poorly treated, anyone who could be convinced to accept their behavior as normal. Mari lifted her chin and stared him down, her whole body calm and still, like in the early days on Wyatt’s crew when she wanted Jack to know he couldn’t fluster her.

  She wasn’t an easy target. And when her hands wanted to shake and her eyes wanted to drop and her heart tried to climb out of her chest, remembering how much Brad’s big hands could hurt if she pushed him . . . she just remembered the feeling of Jack’s scars under her hands. The bumps and textures that reminded her of what he’d risked when he tried to leave the abuse.