Free Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson Page A

seeing me for the first time. His breath came out. A current sparked and caught and flowed between us, opening us up to each other, and I felt like he saw all the way down into the bottom of me, saw how scared I was, how helpless, saw me at the top of that seesaw. He saw how perfectly unable I was to save me and Natty, but how some secret piece of me wished he could. How I wanted him to be magic and save us all. He nodded, faintly. Like he was saying I could have my way. He would save us. And then a great peaceful calm washed out of him and into me. I swear.
    “I’m William Ashe.” But he wasn’t saying his name so much as making me a promise.
    “Shandi,” I said, and my voice was steady.
    Because I knew then. William Ashe was going to save us. William Ashe was the brave one, the bold one. He was the great god Thor. I wanted to lean across my son’s head and press my mouth to his and taste him and let him suck all this certainty out of my mouth. I wanted to be his, or maybe just be him.
    I heard Stevie say, “Can you make anything else? That moves like that bird?”
    While he was speaking, under his question, I said three words to William Ashe, barely audible. Three perfect, beautiful words that left a taste in me like honey.
    “Gun. File cabinet,” I said.
    He nodded, like he was saying yes to Stevie, but I knew it was for me. He was telling me, message received. He knew where the other gun was. I felt myself easing. It was like he’d put his big hands on the seesaw. He couldn’t let it down slow until my feet touched ground. Not yet. But he had me held steady for now, and it was enough.
    “I can make a jumping frog,” he said to Stevie. “I can make a top.”
    When he turned, it broke our stare, and that was probably all that saved me from leaning in closer and actually kissing him, Stevie be damned. The electric connection was over, but my certainty remained. William Ashe was going to make this right or die trying.
    There was a concentrated pause. Stevie’s eyebrows knitted together, like his biggest decision now was which paper toy to choose for himself.
    The air conditioner went off. I hadn’t noticed it while it was running, but the sudden quiet startled me. I think I held my breath, and Stevie’s head went up like a dog who smells something bad coming on the wind.
    The phone rang again.

 
    Chapter 4
    T he thing with feathers,” Bridget says. She changed Shit Park into a beautiful place full of birdhouses. People followed her lead, wanting a piece of that completeness that had let her do it. By summer the park had butterfly flowers and bird feeders and wind chimes strung in all the trees. Bridget had willed it into a reclaimed space.
    William’s heart catches, stops, and then bangs his paused blood forward again. The restart is so rapid that William feels it as a revving in his chest. He stares at the girl in the poppy-covered dress. She has opened her mouth and pulled his wife’s voice out of his head and into the room.
    Of course, it isn’t Bridget speaking. It only sounds like her. Exactly.
    “I’m William Ashe,” he tells her. He wants her to say more words.
    She says her name, “Shandi,” banging down on the first syllable and almost swallowing the i , just as Bridget would.
    William has his own idea of destiny, separate from fate, or signs and wonders. So for a moment he has no explanation for the way she’s lighting up the room with Bridget’s presence. Bridget’s high, clear voice is so very different from this girl’s scared, husky whisper. It isn’t the words themselves, either, though the first thing she said was one of Bridget’s go-to quotes.
    Then it clicks for him; it is the accent.
    It’s not a common way of speaking. William, born and raised in Morningside, is a true Atlanta native. He talks like everyone on television.
    Bridget spent her first sixteen years in a small town across the Georgia border, in North Carolina. Years of Atlanta living shortened her stretched