Page 63 of The Words We Lost

I watch him until I can’t watch him anymore, at least not from in here.

My stomach is both fire and ice as I step onto that deck, each sensation warring for their rightful place, and I don’t know which will win—the frost that’s kept my heart safe for so long, or the fire that burns hot whenever I’m within arm’s reach of this man.

I’m silent as I grip the sun-warmed rail beside him, aiming my gaze to the endless horizon.

“I could have read that entire last chapter with my eyes closed.” Joel’s voice is so hoarse it blends with the wind. “I’ve replayed the details of that night almost as many times as I’ve replayed the details of...” His tortured gaze ignites my fear. “The last time I saw Hal alive.”

“Please,” I struggle to speak. “I don’t want to talk about that night.”

He pushes off the railing, his focus shifting down to me. “Of course you don’t. You never have. But you’re not the only one who suffered a loss that night, Ingrid. You’re not the only one whose future was demolished by the choices of a man who put his addiction before everything else in his world. Can’t you see that?” he pleads. “Can’t you see thatIneeded to talk?”

By the fervor in his voice, I know exactly where he’s headed next. Not to the night when he found my father drinking in a bar thirty minutes south of town with his sponsor, or to the night of the shipwreck. But to a night six months after the Campbells paid for a headstone to be placed in a gated cemetery on the fancy side oftown. To that breezy fall evening when I met Joel on the hotel dock and told him I couldn’t stay here any longer.

“We did talk,” I say warily. “It’s why I came back after fall semester. To talk to you in person.”

“No.” He laughs gruffly. “You came back to give me some lame excuse about how your internship had turned into something more. That you’d said yes to the editorial assistant job because you were unsure of your future here—ofourfuture here together.” He steps closer, shakes his head. “And even still, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe it was over. I fought and I waited and I prayed because I’ve known you were it for me since I was seventeen years old. You’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted to spend my life with.” He grips the back of his neck, making it nearly impossible not to see the ink printed on his forearm. “I promised you my grandmother’s ring after graduation. We circled our wedding date on the hotel calendar for the following summer. I was saving up for a down payment on a home for us, and you threw it all back in my face because you were too afraid to justtalkto me!”

“Talking about problems doesn’t fix them!” My father’s words explode into the space between us but Joel doesn’t so much as flinch.

“Andnottalking about them will kill you.”

“Fine!” I shout. “You want me to tell you how it really was for me? Every time you looked at me, every time you spoke to me, every time you reached for me, all I could feel was the knife blade of your omissions plunging deeper and deeper into my chest. You promised that if I left for college you’d watch over him! You promised you’d keep him out of trouble! And instead, you hid the fact that he’d relapsed long before the night he boarded your father’s boat for the last time. You were the last person to see him alive, and yet nothing about his death makes any sense!” I scream into the blustering wind as a sob cracks inside my throat. “He drowned onyourwatch, Joel!”

“You’re right. Is that what you need to hear me say? That I made a horrible judgment call when I decided to delay telling you about your dad’s relapse until after your finals were over? Okay, I’ll sayit. I’ll say it however many times you need to hear it. I was wrong, Ingrid. And there’s not a single day that goes by that I don’t regret not telling you as soon as I found out. If I could go back, I would. If I could change it, I would.” His voice dips low. “I only ever wanted to protect you.”

“I wasn’t the one who needed to be protected.”

“Of course you were.” His words reverberate in my ears. “Youwere the child, Hal was the parent, the father. It was never your job to protect him. Please tell me you can see that now, Ingrid. Tell me you can see the way your whole life stood still for his. How the dependence he created on you robbed you of your childhood, of the future you wanted. . . of the future we both wanted.”

“That future died the minute my father’s body was recovered in the middle of the Pacific.” I summon the frost to come back, to protect the last thawed piece of my heart. “Relationships aren’t meant to survive that kind of trauma;wenever could have survived it.”

“You can’t possibly know what we could have survived. You never even gave us the chance to try!”

Before I can fight back, a strong wind gust whips between us and funnels into the lantern room through the cracked deck door. A chaotic rustling sound follows as our attention is captured by the funnel of loose pages circling the room inside the lighthouse and several more sailing over our heads toward the beach.

“The memoir!Close thedoor!”

I race inside where hundreds of pages soar and swirl above my head, and I jump to collect as many as possible before they’re lost to us forever. Joel hurtles past me down the spiral staircase and out onto the beach. Against the wind, I yank the gallery deck door closed, and the hollow boom that follows is like the quick snap of a magician’s fingers.

In an instant, the pages freeze mid-air and float to whatever surface they’re closest to. With frantic starts and stops, I continue gathering the pages, combing over every inch in the lantern room, desperate to salvage every lost word. It’s an overwhelming task asthe pages are bent and scattered in random clumps, so unlike the stacked pile of pristine paper we were handed last week. I can only hope Joel caught the few that escaped to the shore before they hit the water.

I’m on my knees, stretching my fingers toward a single page underneath a display case, when I hear Joel enter the foyer, breathing hard.

Winded myself, I slump back on my haunches, adding page ninety-six to the others I’ve retrieved and organized into numerical order once again. I skim the opening paragraphs of the next chapter just long enough for the keywords to stir a memory that’s branded on my body as much as it is on my heart. Only I don’t want to be here for that. I don’t want to relive one more page of this memoir.

“How many pages were there in total?” Joel asks.

“I’m not sure, I never checked.” I get to my feet, dust off my shorts.

“Neither did I. But I think I caught the ones that escaped off the deck.”

I shuffle through the stack in my hands and count the missing pages. “You have twenty-two, twenty-three, forty-eight, and fifty-five?”

Joel studies me from across the foyer and holds up the wrinkled, sandy pages. “All present and accounted for.”

The cautious way he watches me is a reminder of where our conversation left off on the balcony before we nearly lost the last pieces of Cece we have left.

Silently, I take his offering and insert each page back into the stack where they belong before handing the weathered manuscript to him. His voice saysthanks, but his eyes seem to be saying something else entirely. Something I’m not sure I can hear.

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