Page 23 of Shame

I shrug.

“Luke…”

“I found a place a stay,” I tell her. It’s the truth.

“Then why are you here?” She’s dressed for work. Faded jeans, long-sleeved t-shirt. A duffle bag slung across her small body. She looks like she did when I first met her, a gorgeous little art student, way out of my league.

Still true.

“I’ve rented a place.”

Her eyes narrow. “Where?”

I shrug again.

“Luke!”

“There was an empty loft on the second floor.” As I say it out loud, it sounds less clever than it felt when I discovered it on the leasing agent’s website.

Grace purses her lips, takes a deep breath, then matches my shrug with a coolly indifferent one of her own. “That’s a choice, I guess. That will get awkward when I start dating.”

My mouth runs dry. “Are you…”

She rolls her eyes. “You have no fucking right to finish that question.”

“Fair.” I shove my hands in my pockets so she can’t see me ball them into fists. “Yeah. I guess that’ll be hard for me. I need to live with that.”

She keeps glaring at me like that will make me back off. Like I’ll be scared of alook. But the thing is, she’slookingat me. I don’t care why. If she’s looking at me, she might see me.

Or maybe I’m hinging all my hopes on something she’s done for two decades that never made a difference before.

You didn’t let it make a difference.

Well, now I’m going to be a different man. Slowly. Over time. I move to the trunk of my car and open it. Giving her the space to walk past me to her car.

She gives me a wary look, expecting me to get in front of her again, stop her in her tracks. Force her to talk to me.

I want to, of course, but it won’t work. The doc’s words reverberate in my head.“She needs to decide what she wants. You can’t make her try to repair the relationship if she isn’t interested.”

“I’m in 2B,” I offer. “If you ever want to talk.”

Then I grab my shopping and head for the lobby.

It feels like I handled that well. I get settled with my reading, and the afternoon passes.

When I hit a rough chapter about the relationship between fathers and sons, and tears prick the back of my eyelids, hot and uncomfortable, the therapist’s words again ring in my head.

Cathartic. This doesn’t feel cathartic. It’s deeply uncomfortable.

Cathartic was letting Grace look at me with anger burning in her eyes.Thatat least feels like it’s getting me somewhere. Like maybe she could singe me to a crisp so I could rise from the ashes.

Crying just makes my eyes hurt.

I jump off the couch, leaving the book behind. That’s enough reading for one day. I need some food.

I’m halfway to the small kitchenette—these lofts were not created equal—when there’s a knock at the door.

My heart fuckingleaps, like God answered my fucking prayer, and I sprint to open it.

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