Page 86 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

Ravenna must have also been listening at the door, because she popped her head into the room almost at once. “Did someone want me?” she asked.

“No,” Jasper said as he struggled to his feet. This time, Zach was wise enough not to help him. “No one wants you—not in this conversation and definitely not in your children’s lives. That’s the whole point.”

Ravenna went suddenly white, her jaw slack. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not my pardon you need,” Jasper retorted. He swept a glance around the room, his thoughts more evident on his face than I’d everseen them before. When we were young, his expressions had always been impossible to make out, which, if I was being honest, had been a large part of my early attraction to him. A rough, closed-off man who only wakened to vitality in your arms was a heady thing for a girl of nineteen.

The extra lines about his face now, carved as if from stone, were a lot easier to read…even if they had been earned cut by deep, painful cut.

“Look around you, Ravenna,” he said, sweeping his arm around the room. “This is what you walked away from. This is what you gave up.”

The woman wrinkled her nose as her gaze snagged on a stack of visibly dirty laundry shoved halfway under one of the beds. “My sons’ dirty bedroom?”

He practically spit his reply. “No, you fool. Life. Mess.Family.” Even though he didn’t look at me as he spoke, I knew his message wasn’t meant for Ravenna’s ears alone. “Things were hard. You felt trapped and were trying to make the best of a bad situation. So you left.”

“How do you—” Ravenna took one look at Chloe and immediately clamped her mouth shut again.

“I know why you abandoned your kids,” Jasper continued. “I knowhowyou did it, too. You turned yourself around in all kinds of circles, rationalizing to yourself that you were only doing what was best for everyone. They’d be better off without you. They needed more than you could give. A clean break would be the kindest gift you could offer. It would hurt, obviously, but they had their whole lives ahead of them. They’d get over you and move on, and so easily that you felt pretty sure you’d suffer more than they did in the end.”

A hot well of tears sprang to my eyes. I made a motion to wipe them away, but Zach, bless his all-seeing heart, slipped his hand into mine and refused to let go.

“Only that’s not how it works, is it?” Jasper asked. His voice had grown so quiet by this time that he held the entire room spellbound. “You don’t get to decide how other people feel. The things you do matter.The way you hurt these children matters. Maybe you genuinely thought you were taking the only path available to you, but the truth is that you took the path you wanted. And you didn’t give a single, solitary damn what would happen when your kids tried to run after you only to find that you’d barred the way for any of them to follow.”

All at once, two things started happening. Ravenna, who’d gone completely white, started to fold in on herself as if her legs could no longer bear her own weight. And Jasper, equally spent, started to do the same. Since Chloe was the one standing between them, she could only help one.

She chose Jasper.

“Come on, Jasper,” she said, bracing her arm under his and helping him toddle to the door. “I think we should get you home before you say something you regret.”

He smiled down at her in a way I never thought to see again in my lifetime. That particular twist of the lips, all the more valuable because of how difficult it was to extract, had once been my sole delight and joy.

“I don’t regret one word of it,” he said. “They don’t get to walk away and then come back like it doesn’t mean anything. We’re human beings, Chloe. Real live goddamned human beings. Not just some side characters who disappear the second they decide to turn the page.”

“That we are,” she agreed as she led him into the hallway. She paused at the threshold to look at all of us: me and Zach holding hands, Ravenna slowly sinking to the bed. Then she turned her back on us and kept walking. “That we are.”

32

JASPER

The last thing Jasper wanted to do after a day like today was make French toast for the two least grateful children on the face of the planet, but making French toast was exactly what he found himself doing.

“I think it needs more cinnamon,” Trixie said from somewhere over his shoulder. She had some kind of god-awful pop singer blaring out of a portable speaker, so he could barely make out the words. “Chloe always puts in a dash of vanilla, too.”

“And sugar!” Theo cried as he bounded into the room. Jasper would have yelled at him to slow down, but the blessed boy yanked the speaker out of his sister’s hands and switched it off. “No more Taylor Swift,” he announced firmly. “Anythingbut Taylor Swift.”

“Can I help it if she speaks to my soul?” Trixie countered, but she didn’t turn the music back on, so Jasper assumed they were safe. “Do you want me to finish that, Jasper? I don’t mind. I’m done with my homework.”

“No, I’m happy where I am,” he said, and was surprised to find he meant it. The idea of him making breakfast for dinner for a pair of unruly brats while Catherine Martin and a young man who shared his bloodwere wandering around the town was preposterous in the extreme, but everything about this situation was preposterous.

She’s alive. She’s been alive this whole time.

“Do you have maple syrup?” Trixie asked as she started yanking open cupboards to pull out plates and silverware. Jasper realized with a start that she was setting the table. Theo, too, busied himself finding the milk in the fridge and pouring everyone out huge overflowing glasses of the stuff. He’d had to buy no fewer than three full gallons of milk since these two had invaded his home, which made him realize two things: one, that Chloe’s grocery bills must be astronomical; and two, that he loathed the taste of the stuff.

He didn’t stop Theo from filling his cup, though.

“Oooh, he has real maple syrup,” Theo announced when he found the little jug Jasper kept stored in the fridge door. “Like, thefancykind that comes from actual trees. Is it okay if we use this, Jasper, or is it only for special occasions? We can always eat it plain. We do at home all the time.”

Jasper’s chest gave a small heave at the simplicity in the boy’s tone. It had been a long time since he’d belonged to those hand-to-mouth days, when something like real maple syrup was an unimaginable luxury, but memories were resurfacing at an alarming rate. He remembered all too well the hunger that was more than just physical need, the determination to make do with what was available, however little it satisfied. Life had never been easy for people like him, but that didn’t mean he had to sit back and watch these poor kids get pushed down the same path.