Page 69 of The Otherworld

“How do you feel about me?”

For a breathless moment, Adam only stares at me—a quiet conflict raging in his eyes. “How I feel doesn’t matter.” He reaches for a log on the hearth and tosses it into the fireplace, sending a whoosh of golden sparks swirling up the chimney.

Quiet fills the space between us. Adam watches the fire. I watch Adam.

His response might puzzle me if I didn’t know him. If I hadn’t read his journal and familiarized myself with the way his beautiful, brilliant mind works.

“Do you know your one failing, Adam Stevenson?”

He tilts his head to look at me, eyebrows quirked in surprise. “Just one?”

I nod.

“What is it?”

I can tell by the way he asks that he’s genuinely curious to hear my answer. There’s a strange sort of power in having his full attention—in seeing him eager, waiting, keen to know what I’m going to say.

“You’re always putting yourself last.”

He peers at me with a puzzled frown. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, when I was reading your journal, it just seemed so obvious. You’re always thinking of others before yourself. Jack, your parents… You’re always doing things to help them, and at the same time, you feel like you’re not doing enough. You wrote about wanting to build a home but not having anyone to build it for. And how if you’re not building it for someone… it’s not really a home; it’s just a house. And I thought that was beautiful.”

Adam looks down, his ears flushing red. “You really did read the whole thing, didn’t you?”

I bite on a mischievous smile. “Sorry.”

He only needs to glance at my expression for the truth. “No, you’re not.”

“No, I’m not.”

We both laugh unexpectedly, then fall silent, like two joyful waves crashing on the shore and dissolving in a line of foam.

“I didn’t know putting yourself last was a failing,” Adam murmurs.

“Well, I suppose it’s a virtue,” I concede. “But it can also be a vice if it stops you from having the kind of life you want. If you deny yourself because you’re afraid you’ll be letting someone else down…”

Adam gazes into the fire. Flickering gold light outlines his profile, igniting the scar on his cheek and sharpening the square edge of his jaw. “My dad has always been a hard worker,” he begins, his voice low and reflective. “When I was a kid, he worked three jobs. He had a lot of debt and wouldn’t sit still until it was paid off and he was free. I wanted to help out, so I started working when I was still in school. My first job was a paper route when I was twelve. Jack was just a baby then, so Mom had her hands full. I’d take care of him when she couldn’t—bathe him, change his diapers, read him bedtime stories.”

I smile, cradling my tea mug beneath my chin. “Jack said you were like a second father to him.”

Adam nods thoughtfully, toying with a bit of tinder that has strayed from the hearth. “Kids at school used to pick on me. Say I was a mama’s boy. Maybe I was a mama’s boy. I didn’t care. I saw how hard my parents worked. I saw that I could do something to help them, and I wish I could have done more. But I did what I could.” He tosses the kindling into the fire, watching it wither into flame. “When I was fifteen, I got a job working at the airport. Grunt work, really—cleaning bathrooms, taking out the trash, washing the windows. But I loved just being around those planes, watching them land and take off…”

“And that’s when you started flying?”

“I started flying because a very generous pilot was nice enough to take a starry-eyed kid for a spin over the islands.” A smile forms on his lips at the recollection. “That’s when I knew: I wanted to fly for the rest of my life. I didn’t care how much time and hard work it would take to get there.”

“And Jack followed in your footsteps,” I add. “Like father, like son.”

Adam grunts a laugh, absentmindedly petting Lucius, who has fallen asleep between us. “Jack has always been the opposite of me.”

“Yet he wants to be like you,” I point out. “He worships you.”

Adam looks unconvinced. “What makes you think that?”

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

He narrows his eyes at me, as though I’m written in a foreign language he can’t translate. “How did you learn so much about us in just a few days?”

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