Page 208 of That Rush

I built certainty for myself and handed it to her as a gift.

I turn off the drill and set it on the floor. Sawdust still lines the baseboards. A pencil mark beside the window shows where I planned to mount the desk. I wrote her name there, a clear directive for anyone helping me.

Paige understood exactly what I meant by the room, and that was the problem.

She saw a future taking shape around her before I ever asked her to help shape it. When I finally asked whether she could picture marrying me, I reduced her answer to yes or no. But she gave me more than that. I can hear her voice now, telling me what she wanted, and this time I don't hear the limits.

My daughter. Our Fridays. Mornings here. Nights at my cabin.

I heard the cabin and the parts she needed to keep, then decided they mattered more to her than I did.

I remember her standing in my living room, her hands clenched at her sides.

“Losing you would destroy me.”

She said it like a fact she hated admitting. She refused to make a promise out of fear, and when I ended our relationship, she accepted the choice that hurt her instead.

I mistook that control for ease because anger was simpler than admitting I wanted her to overrule me.

She walked away because I told her we were done. The steady line of her back wasn’t ease. It was control.

I look through the window toward the foreman’s house. From here, I can see the porch where she reads with her feet in my lap and the upstairs window of the room where her toothbrush still stands beside mine. I built every connection I could see and assumed love meant she wanted the walls built higher around her.

She kept asking whether there would still be room for her inside them.

I leave the shelves standing. Building the future I designed without her would only repeat the mistake. The room can wait until I can build a question instead of an answer.

She could picture a life with me; she just needed to know she would still exist inside of it.

Chapter 30

Paige

Twenty-three children roar at me on cue, which proves heartbreak has not affected my ability to command a room full of people under eight.

“Excellent,” I announce. “You have successfully scared every responsible adult out of the forest.”

A little boy near the front points toward his mother. “She’s still here.”

“She’s very brave,” I tell him.

His mother laughs while he studies her, as if seeing her for the first time.

I turn the picture book toward the group and continue reading. The dragon on the page has lost his treasure, his map, and any sense of direction. Every few paragraphs, I stop so the children can choose which path he should take. Their voting system involves shouting, arm waving, and one determined girl’s insistence that the cave needs glitter before anyone enters it.

The program runs twelve minutes longer than planned.

Nobody cries. The craft glue remains mostly on the paper. Every child leaves with a book, an activity sheet, and the conviction that dragons make excellent library patrons if they promise not to set the returns bin on fire.

On the surface, I am doing fine.

“Great program,” my coworker says, gathering abandoned water bottles for the trash. “You had them the whole time.”

“Fear is an effective teaching method.”

“You let them roar indoors.”

“Controlled rebellion builds trust.”