Page 88 of Thin Ice

"Yeah. I would have."

"And I needed to go."

I stood there on the deck with the cold in my lungs and the gray sky pressing down and looked at him. He was standing by the railing, crying, his hands at his sides, his coffee abandoned on the snow-covered wood. He looked like a kid. He looked like me at ten years old, standing in the kitchen, watching my dad's taillights go down the road and knowing, knowing in my body before my brain could form the thought, that he wasn't coming back.

He's going to leave you. Everyone leaves. It's the same story and it never ends differently.

I tried to fight it. I stood there on the deck and I tried to push that thought out of my head because I knew it wasn't fair. I knew Alex was not my father. I knew this was different. I could feel the difference in my bones. But the feeling was bigger than the knowing. The fear was older than the logic, and it had deeper roots, and it wrapped around my chest and squeezed until I couldn't breathe.

"I can't do this," I said.

His face broke. "Liam. Don't."

"I can't keep doing this. I can't keep waiting for you to decide that this isn't enough."

"You are enough. You've always been—"

"Then why did you go back?"

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. And in that silence I heard the answer I was afraid of, even though it wasn't the answer he was trying to give. In that silence, I heard everything I'd ever been told about people like me and people like him.

"I already told you."

"I can't do this right now," I said. "I need to not be here right now."

"Liam, please don't walk away—"

"I'm going for a walk."

"Liam."

But I was already moving. Down the deck steps, through the snow in the yard, past the dead fire pit and the Adirondack chairs and the path that led into the trees along the south shore. I could hear him behind me saying my name, and I kept walking because if I stopped, I was going to say something I couldn't take back, or I was going to fall apart, and both of those things felt like the same thing.

The trail went into the pines. The snow was thinner under the trees, just a dusting over frozen ground, and my boots crunched on it and my breath was loud in my ears and I walked faster, then faster, my hands in fists at my sides, and the trees closed around me and the cabin disappeared behind me and I was alone.

I stopped at a clearing where the trail bent toward the lake. A break in the pines, an opening to the frozen water, the gray sky above. I stood there, my chest heaving and my eyes burning. I put my hands on my knees and tried to breathe.

Stop. Stop it. This is not the same story.

But it felt the same. It felt exactly the same. The person you love standing in the kitchen telling you they have to go somewhere, and the door closing and the car backing down the drive and the sound of the engine fading and the quiet after. The quiet that means you weren't enough to make them stay.

He came back. He came back with coffee. He's standing on the deck right now.

I knew that. I knew he had come back. But my dad came back too, for a while. Came back on weekends. Came back for birthdays. Came back with promises, and then the weekends got further apart, and the birthdays got shorter, and the promises got lighter until they weighed nothing at all, and then he was gone, and the gone was permanent.

I sat down on a rock at the edge of the clearing. The cold came through my jeans immediately. I didn't care. I sat there and looked at the frozen lake and the tears came, finally, the ones I'd been holding since the deck, and I let them come because nobody was here and I didn't have to be strong and I was so tired of being strong.

You are enough.

He'd said it. Right there on the deck. His voice breaking, tears on his face, reaching for me. You are enough.

And I'd walked away from it.

I sat on the rock and cried and the lake didn't care and the trees didn't care and the cold didn't care, and after a while the crying slowed and my breathing evened out and I was just sitting there, empty and quiet, with snow on my shoulders and the taste of salt on my lips.

I didn't know how long I'd been gone. Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Long enough for the cold to get into my bones. Long enough for the anger to drain out and leave something worse underneath it.

Shame.