Free Exposed by Jasinda Wilder

around the coffee mug.
    He shrugs, a gesture of dismissal. “No big deal.”
    “It is, though, isn’t it? To have my name?”
    His eyes go to mine, and their fierce indigo brilliance pins me. “It’s only as meaningful as you make it. It only means something if you
do
something with it. Identity is what you make of it, X, Isabel, whatever you want to call yourself. And that’s really it, isn’t it? What you
want
to call yourself. Who you want to be. All of us are looking for our identity, aren’t we? I mean, we grow up, we spend our lives searching for meaning, for substance. To matter. That’s why people drink, or do drugs, or gamble, or get tattoos all over their bodies, or make art, or play music in a band, or write books, or sleep with a different person every night. To figure out who they are. For some people, their identity is rooted in their history. I mean, where I grew up, I knew people who’d lived their entire lives in San Diego, never left it. Their parents moved there, and they were born there, and they’ll never leave. Their dad was a lawyer, so they’ll be a lawyer. That’s easy, for them. It may not be much, but it’s who they are. Others, it’s harder, isn’t it? I had to make my own way. I had to decide what I wanted to do with my life. Did I want to be a gangbanger, a drug dealer, a criminal? Did I want to end up dead, or in jail? Then I was a mechanic in the army. And then I was a security contractor, a soldier. And then I was nothing. I was wounded, flat on my back in a hospital with no future and a dead-end past. I had to start over. I had to decide all over again what I wanted. Who I wanted to be. I’ve always loved creating, using my hands, being active. So I got intohouse flipping.” He flattens his palms on the table, and I can’t help but be drawn to his hands, to the weathered lines, the roughness of them. They are such big, strong, capable hands. Hard as rock, rough as cinder blocks. “I ripped up old floors and knocked down walls and tore out cabinets. Stripped the houses down to studs, to bare bones. And I made them new, built new walls, new cabinets, new floors. I made them beautiful, and I sold them. And I turned that into a lucrative business. That’s my identity. I build things. I built houses, and now I build businesses and sell them. Kind of like what I did with houses, but for entire companies.”
    “You rebuilt yourself.”
    He nods. “More than once.”
    “How do you do it? How do you build an identity?”
    “Takes guts and determination, I guess. Like anything else in life, really. I mean, you look at your life and your skills and you decide what you like, what feels right, and you follow that where it leads.”
    I stare down at the tabletop. “I don’t know if I can do that. The life I have, it’s not perfect, but it’s what I know. And it’s all I have. It’s all I’ve ever had. I mean, yes, you’ve told me I had parents, and that I went to school, but where does that take me from here? How does that help me know what to do about Caleb?”
    I hadn’t meant to ask that last question, but it just came out.
    “I can’t decide that for you. You have to figure it out for yourself.” He won’t look at me.
    “I’m sorry, Logan. I don’t mean to bring him up when I’m with you. But it’s the reality of my life. I know you believe he’s bad, and there are parts of him and his life that I don’t like. Things that, the more I learn about them, just make me uncomfortable. But he’s been there for me since I woke up, Logan. He gave me an identity, what little of one I have. He was with me every single day while I was learning to walk and talk again. I started from nothing. I mean,a lot of the basics came back pretty quickly, but my muscles were atrophied, and the part of my brain that controlled speech had been damaged, so I had to relearn how to walk and talk. The first two years of my life after waking up were spent in physical therapy and speech