Free Return to Me by Justina Chen Page B

continued, “what happened to her?”
    “Her agency sent her back home to Brazil, I think. I’ve never seen her again.”
    There it was, a tendril of hope, so tender it could barely support the weight of my growing fantasy. Given another day or week, Dad would surely inventory all that he was sacrificing: our family, Reid, me. The balance sheet would tilt in our favor—how could it not?—and then Giselle would vanish from our lives, a shiny light that had temporarily blinded my father, blindsided the rest of us. So enamored with this homecoming vision, I was caught off-guard by what Jackson was now saying: “In a weird way, the affair was good for their relationship.”
    “Good?” I asked, honestly flummoxed. “How is that even possible?”
    “I’m not saying it’ll be good for your parents, but for mine, it was what they needed to appreciate each other.”
    The echo of my accusation at my mother—
you’ve never once appreciated him
—rumbled in my head. But I refused to follow Jackson’s path of rationalization, not when I kept stumbling over the rocky shore of truth: How could “affair” be uttered in the same breath as “good”?
    “Anyhow,” Jackson trailblazed over my silence, “my parents went into pretty intensive counseling for a couple of years and threw me into therapy. My sister was already in college, so sheescaped that torture. But you know, they worked through it. We all did.”
    “How can this be good?”
    “It opened up their communication and made them deal with a bunch of issues they’d been brushing under the rug. Like money and Mom’s shopping. And Dad’s control-freak ways.”
    Suddenly, combustive anger flared through me. “So your father justified his affair because your mom liked to shop?”
    “No…”
    “And are you suggesting that sleeping with someone outside of your relationship is a good thing?”
    “Rebel—”
    I surged to my feet and gripped the metal railing. “Because if you are—”
    “I’m not. Look, even though things worked out for the best for my parents, it doesn’t mean it was easy.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
    “Did you really want to know?”
    Feeling more at odds with Jackson than ever before, I wrapped an arm around my middle. Shivering, I said, “You know what? I’m tired. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
    Without waiting for Jackson’s response, I hung up. Even though I set the cell phone far from me on the balcony floor, no amount of distance could fend off the foreboding that there was yet more hard news ahead. Jackson’s secret was a boulder that had sheared without warning off a mountain cliff, marooning me on one side of a trail, him on the other.

    Around midnight, I vacillated in that infuriating state of being exhausted but unable to sleep. Every time I thought I might drift off, my mind replayed the conversations from the day until they jumbled into one giant morass of Mom-Dad-Jackson confusion. The thought of organizing my space—despite my moving out in a few weeks—felt comforting. So I methodically opened the boxes stacked neatly against the back wall.
    The first box contained everything I held most dear: the artifacts from my summer architectural program and the first present Jackson ever gave me. I set the smooth river rock down beside a framed photo of us, so easy with each other from the start that I had convinced myself we were fated to be together. But if I could be stunned by Dad and his ability to cheat and his capacity to lie, then how well did I truly know anyone?
    What other secrets, unknown and untapped, resided within Jackson?
    I dove back into the moving box and retrieved my clock, the one Grandpa had given me shortly after Grandma Stesha left. That clock had lulled me to sleep night after night, each tick a heartbeat of steadfast love. The journey across the country had broken its delicate inner workings. No matter what knobs I pushed or dials I twisted, the timepiece had stopped when