“You’re still here,” he said, sounding surprised.
“I told you I would stay.”
He brought his hand up to my cheek and ran his fingers over my skin. His eyes were still red from yesterday, and his voice sounded scratchy when he spoke.
“I’m sorry you saw me like that.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I told him. “Sometimes, you have to let go of it all.”
“I’ve never fallen apart like that before.”
“What about when…when you found them?”
Aiden shook his head slowly.
“I never cried about it.”
I considered the implications of what he was saying. How could a father not cry over his child’s death?
“You didn’t?”
“No.” He looked at my eyes. “Not even when they buried him. I just…I just kept thinking it was all a nightmare, and I’d wake up and he’d be there, asking me to get his tricycle built for him. I was going to do it that week, but I never had the chance.”
I knew everyone dealt with grief differently, but crying seemed to be the ultimate outlet of emotions. I’d always been taught that it was important to cry when you felt loss. I didn’t understand how all this time could have passed without Aiden allowing himself to cry.
“It’s all right to cry, Aiden,” I said.
“I know,” he responded with a shrug of his shoulder. “I just never did.”
“Now you have,” I pointed out. “Maybe you needed to.”
“I guess so.” He yawned. “Right now, I just need coffee.”
We made breakfast together. The rain stopped as we ate, but it was too wet to sit outside. Aiden moved the boxes off the couch, and we sat in the living room.
“You want to know the rest?” he asked quietly.
“I think I need to,” I replied.
“You do.” Aiden rested his hands in his lap as he gathered himself. “Since that day—the day I found them—I’ve spent my life trying to put it right. When I wasn’t working, I was at the police station, talking to people around town, and doing everything I could to figure out who had done it. I stopped talking to the girl I had recently started dating, stopped going out with friends—I didn’t even go to a movie for the next two years.”
He turned to me.
“You’re the first girl I’ve been with since that day,” he said as he looked back at his hands. “I just felt drawn to you, like maybe you were what I needed to keep me going. I was starting to give up hope, and I thought you could…I don’t know…bring me out of it.”
“I didn’t want to tell you about it,” he continued. “I didn’t want you to know because when someone finds out, they want me to talk about it. They want me to explain, and that’s just…it’s just hard.”
“You didn’t tell me because it hurts,” I said.
He nodded.
“It was nice,” he said, “not to have to talk about it. Even with the guys, it comes up because most of them are trying to do something about it.”
He glanced at me, and his eyes were dark.
“I need to make the people responsible for it pay, Chloe. I can’t even consider anything else until that happens.”
I thought about what that might entail.