6
HYACINTH
I gasped and shook my head. The tears returned, but this time for a different reason entirely. I wasn't sad or guilty or heartbroken. I was happy.
“Am I always going to make you cry?” he asked, his voice more tender than I'd ever heard it.
I smiled at him, and then laughed. The hard glint to his eye, the stiffness in his shoulders was now gone. All I had to do was agree with him that I wanted to be happy—with him—for the real Jackson I knew to return. I'd made him hard and reticent, a fighter working to claim the prize. Me.
Sharing the horrible incident that happened to Jane and me had been liberating. Freeing. Looking back, I'd only seen it one way, through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl, and I'd kept that view as I grew older. What Jackson had urged me to consider m
