“Did I give you a long enough moment?” Jesse asked, standing in the doorway of the stall like he was waiting for an invitation. “Because I can give you more time if you want.” He hitched his thumb over his shoulder.
“Come on in,” I said, patting the bale beside me and scooting over. “I’ve had more than enough moments to think.”
“How are you doing?” he asked, taking a seat next to me. “Wait. That was a stupid question.” Jesse shook his head and looked at a loss for words. “What’s been going through your mind? Besides everything?”
I gave him a small smile. “Besides everything? I suppose realizing the worst part of the night wasn’t Pierce showing up.” I played with a piece of straw. Jesse shifted closer and draped his arm around my shoulders. “The worst part was that my mom invited him here.” Jesse stared at the ground and nodded. “What Pierce did was not right, I’m not excusing that, but he was basically a stranger who had no interest in my life. My mom . . . She’s my mother. She’s the person who’s supposed to love me first, and last, and best. She’s the person who’s supposed to fight with her life to keep scumbags like Pierce out of her child’s life. She’s supposed to . . .” I had to swallow to get the word out, “care.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing my temple.
“I just don’t get it, Jesse. It’s so goddamned unfair. Why? Why does my mother hate me? Why do I feel like the biggest screw up when I’m around her? Why, after everything, do I still want her to look at me and say she’s proud of me and give me a honest to goodness hug?” Another set of tears dripped their way down my face. “I’ve got so many ‘whys’ I’ll never have answered, they’ll probably drive me insane.”
Jesse waited for me to catch my breath and dry my tears before he responded. I was so exhausted, I just sank into his arms and rested.
“We’ve all got questions. We’ve all got dark parts of us that we wonder how they got there,” he said slowly. “We all, at times, feel like the positively most screwed up person to have ever walked the planet. But you know what, Rowen? We don’t always need to know the answers. We shouldn’t get hung up on the questions we can’t answer because life, by definition, is confusing. We’re never going to have all the answers. Never. We should focus on the questions we can answer and make peace with the ones we can’t.”
It was a lovely thought and it would have looked great on an inspirational poster, but Jesse’s life was so very different from mine. His questions he couldn’t answer were easy to move past because they didn’t consume him the way mine did me.
“Jesse, I love you and I love those things you just said, but how could you even think you could compare the questions I have from my f**ked up life to the questions that have cropped up during your next-to-perfect life?” I knew Jesse had experienced pain and heartache, every human did, but there was pain and there was PAIN.
Jesse let out a long sigh. “I know my life seems idyllic, Rowen. I know you probably think I’m an idiot for drawing a parallel between your life and mine. But my life wasn’t always so great.” He paused and didn’t say anything else for what seemed like forever. “My life didn’t begin the way it is now. In fact, my life couldn’t have been more different than it is now.”
My brows came together. “What do you mean?” I looked up at him, and his eyes were somewhere else. Somewhere frightening.
“Neil and Rose are my dad and mom, Rowen. I want you to know that because that’s one of the truest things I know. But they didn’t become so until I was five years old.”
“Wait.” I shook my head, sure I was missing something. “What are you saying, Jesse?”
“I was adopted.”
I couldn’t reply. At least not right away. Had I heard him wrong? Had he said it wrong? “You were . . . adopted?”
“Yes. I was taken out of my home when I was four by Child Protective Services. From there, I drifted around in the foster care system for about a year until Neil and Rose—my mom and dad—adopted me.”
The stall spun a bit. Information was coming at me a little too fast. “C.P.S. took you away from your parents?”
Jesse cleared his throat. “They took me away from the people who conceived me.”
I wasn’t sure whose expression was more broken: his or mine. “Why?” It didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t I known? Why hadn’t anyone told me?
Jesse’s arm went rigid around me. “Because they lacked . . . parental skills.” His words were flat and emotionless, but his face wasn’t. His face gave away the pain running through him.
“What? I don’t understand.” In fact, I didn’t have a clue. “Did they hurt you? What happened?”
“Yes, they hurt me. Yes, they didn’t take care of me.” Jesse shifted and dropped his head against the wall. “The point of me telling you this now is that I wanted you to know you’re not alone, Rowen. I know what it’s like to want to curl up and die rather than get up and face another day. I know what it’s like to feel like not a single soul in the world would care if you died. I know what it’s like to lose all of your faith in humanity.”
I had a sudden and overwhelming urge to protect Jesse from both his past and future struggles. To drape my arms around him and hold him tight the way he did me when I needed comfort.
“God, Jesse,” I said, wrapping my arm around his stomach. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry seems like the worst possible thing I could say. But I can’t think of anything else.” What did a person say to that? How did a person comfort another after that kind of a reveal? I didn’t know. I’d never had anyone show me the loving way to respond.
“I’m sorry works,” he said. “I’m not telling you because I’m looking for sympathy, Rowen. I’m telling you so you know you’re not alone. So you know you can walk away from a tragic past and live a peaceful life.”
A peaceful life. What I wouldn’t give to have one, but I was certain I’d never attain it. People like me, who’d lived the kind of life I had, didn’t live peaceful lives.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I sat up and twisted on the bale so I could look at him square on. Why hadn’t he told me? We’d talked about seemingly everything else. I wasn’t naive enough to think we didn’t still have some secrets, but I didn’t think they’d be those kinds of secrets. Monumental ones.
As I thought about all of the things I’d written off, it seemed so obvious, I should have figured it out. The lack of any physical similarities between Jesse and the rest of his family, the absence of his baby picture on Neil’s office wall with the girls’, people dropping hints about Jesse’s life not always being so paved with gold. It was all so clear after I’d been given the last piece of the puzzle.
“I was going to, Rowen. Soon.” Jesse turned so he looked me straight on as well. The skin between his eyebrows had been pinched together the entire conversation. “But it’s not something I tell just anybody.”
“Was it because you didn’t trust me enough to want to tell me?” I worked to keep my voice level and my eyes on his.
“Of course not. I’d trust you with my life, Rowen. I trust you implicitly.” His forehead wrinkled, too. “I didn’t tell you right away so you could get to know me, who I am now, before I told you who I was then. I wanted you to know my present before you knew my past. I wanted to know that if you chose to be with me, it was because you loved me. Not because you pitied me.”
I wiped my eyes before the tears forming could fall. “Are you ashamed of it?”
Jesse leaned forward. “No, just the opposite. I’m proud that Dad and Mom saw something in me I didn’t, and they believed in me.” He looked down at where our hands were entwined. He stared for so long, I wondered if he saw something in them I didn’t. “I just don’t see how it’s relevant for every person I come in contact with to know I was adopted. It’s my past. Yeah, I had a rough go of life. But I buried it six feet deep, made my peace with it, and moved on. I’m not going to let my past ruin my future.”
He buried it, made peace with it, and moved on. Could I ever do the same?
Right then, after everything that had happened, it didn’t seem so likely.
“And you had questions?” I asked.
He nodded and his eyes returned to mine. “I had so many damn questions I didn’t know what to do with all of them, but I stopped looking for answers that never wanted to be found and moved on. When the Walkers walked into that adoption agency, they took a huge chance on a troubled boy who likely would have turned into a violent teen. I wasn’t going to repay them for taking that chance by living up to what everyone thought I’d turn into.” He lifted our hands to his mouth and brushed his lips over my knuckles. “You and I are not so different, after all.”
And that was where he was so very wrong.
“Jesse, don’t you see?” I said, my voice high. “Our stories might have started out the same, but that’s the only similarity. You took a bad situation and turned yourself into the person you are today.” I paused just long enough to catch my breath. “I took a bad situation and let it define me.”
Jesse combed his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “No, you took a bad situation, let it define you for a while, and then you decided to overcome it.” He formed his hand over my cheek. “It just took you a little longer than me.”
I wanted to believe that. God, I would have given anything to believe that. But I couldn’t believe a lie. I couldn’t betray myself by accepting a lie.
“That’s the most sugar-coated version of a half-truth I’ve ever heard,” I said, my voice elevating. “Beneath this ‘reformed’ girl you fell in love with is the screwed-up girl I’ve been my whole life. A girl who will always be, no matter how you try to put it, screwed up.” I made myself look away from his eyes. It made what I had to do easier. “A girl with my past doesn’t deserve a guy with your future, Jesse.”
“Oh please,” Jesse said, hanging his head back. “Get over the I deserve this and I don’t deserve this crap and start choosing what’s healthy for you. How about being honest with yourself as to what you want? Because maybe you can have it.” Jesse’s voice had gone up, too. We were both past the point of keeping our cool.
“Healthy? Honest?” I popped up because I couldn’t stay seated any longer. “So easy for you to say. You’re the one living a charmed life with a family who loves you, not the one who will have no one, no one, after this summer! So don’t lecture me on what’s healthy!”
Jesse inhaled slowly and exhaled slowly. “You’re pushing me away again, Rowen. You’re hurting me.” Jesse waited for me to look at him. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t.