Page 74 of Chasing Smoke

She nods.

“I keep feeling like I have to do something. But what is there to do? He’s not here. I can’t make sense of any of it.” My chest tightens as though I have heartburn.

“That’s the trap.” Deacon’s voice is grave but quiet.

I look at him.

He’s looking at the table, not at me. “You want to yell at him. You want to demand an explanation. But there’s no version of this where that happens. You’re carrying this thing around and you have nowhere to go.” Deacon meets my gaze.

I nod. Yes, that’s it exactly. My chin wobbles while the lump in my throat grows and I have to gnash my teeth together.

He nods back. “That’s the trap.”

Dottie takes a long breath in through her nose and lets it out slowly through her mouth. “I ran from a bad man once.” The corners of Dottie’s red-coated lips tilt down. I know I’m going to get some version of the story that she tells everyone, but I can also tell that today, there’s some level of truth in what she’s saying. “I got in a car and I drove and I didn’t stop until I reached a little town I’d never heard of. A place where I thought I could start my life over. For the first six months, I’d lie in bed going over every conversation, every moment we spent together, wondering how I didn’t see it. How I missed all the red flags. How it was possible to be that blind.”

She looks at me, and there’s a heaviness in her gaze that I’ve never seen before. I realize for the first time that she’s carrying around her own heartache.

“You’ll do that for a while. Rewrite every conversation you ever had, every trip you took, every time he went out of town and called home to tell you what he was up to. You’re gonna open every drawer in your mind to see what you can find. It will be like that for a while.”

Tears build in my eyes, but they don’t fall. “Then what?”

“Then one day you’re gonna open a drawer and find nothing in it. And then a week will pass. Then a month. Then a year. And you’ll realize you haven’t opened any drawers in a while.”

“That’s it?”

She nods. “That’s it.”

“That doesn’t feel like enough.”

She nods again. “I know.”

Deacon shifts in his chair, drawing my attention. “You can’t fix him. You can’t fix whatever it is he did. The one thing you can do is not hand him any more of your life. It’s a tragedy that he died, no way around that. But he already took something from you. Don’t let him take away your future.”

I stare at him.

Deacon pushes away from the table and stands, then looks at my scone. “I’ll get you something else.”

“No, this is fine.”

He reaches for the plate. “I’ll get you something different. You don’t want this one.”

He walks back over to the display, picks something from the plethora of pastries, and sets it on a plate.

Dottie leans across the table and puts her hand on mine. “You listen to me, sweetheart. You do not carry this alone. You talk to Nina, you talk to Ansel. Heck, come see me at the café or come in here to talk to Deacon.” She glances over at where he’s making his way back to us. “He’s a better listener than most people realize.” She squeezes my hand. “This town knew how to sit with you when Caleb died. They’ll know how to sit with you for this.”

“But they don’t even know what happened.”

“They don’t need to know the whole story to be able to sit with you through it.” She pats my hand and straightens out as Deacon slides a new plate in front of me.

“Eat that.” He nods at the pastry.

“What is it?”

“The Ansel.”

I arch an eyebrow.

“A chocolate habanero croissant that probably shouldn’t work, but does.” He shrugs. “Sometimes two things that shouldn’t work are actually magic when you put them together, even if most people don’t think they would complement each other.”