What Burns Away by Melissa Falcon Field Read Free Book Online

surprised me with that giant cake. I remember thinking everything would go back to normal between us after my birthday. But, a week later, the neighbors told me you had gone off to Texas with Eddie Gabes. I realized that the cake was your good-bye. By the time you returned, I had already left for college.
    I haven’t thought about that in years.
    Claire
    We were in our church clothes when Dean reached under my romper, my face wet with the tears I tasted on his lips. Writing the email to Dean, I relived it, how it felt—being in the house that had haunted me all those years—the heat of that windowsill we pressed ourselves against, the vaulted walls in the cavernous Victorian house at Quayside that was like the hold of a ship into which my mother moved the wreckage of our lives after my father died.
    And now I couldn’t stop myself from seeing it, that big, white house emerging from the fog in a daydream that preoccupied my thoughts as I stood at the sink a thousand miles away, slicing an apple for my son.
    So, when Dean told me that he was the new titleholder of 101 Quayside, perched in that very room where we had made love, the home office from which he wrote me, I felt the ache I’d always felt inside that house.
    Claire—
    Pretty tragic we never crossed paths when you were still in Connecticut. And in Mystic of all places, only twenty minutes up the road. We could’ve been doing this all over drinks. Also, I feel awkward mentioning this to you since you hadn’t brought it up when you contacted me, and I’m surprised your mother wouldn’t have told you, but I bought 101 Quayside from them a few years back. I saw Kat and Craig at the closing. Your mom looked great. She and I are actually Facebook friends. She reached out to me just once, maybe six months after the real estate market crashed, saying she felt bad, telling me she was certain that over time the house would regain its value. It’s weird, right?
    And, I should mention, I hadn’t sought out the place or anything like that. Another broker told me it was listed. He thought it was a great investment but didn’t have the capital and talked me into it. He got the commission, of course.
    Anyway, I never intended to live here. We kept it as a corporate rental, you know, an income property. Too much of you inside these walls for me to consider it otherwise. But then things changed, business-wise and personally, so now I’m here on the waterfront.
    Really, can you even fathom it? Me, a cranky east-end son of a bitch, taking up residence with the yuppies? It’s temporary. A transition. Soon I’ll need to make some dough off the property, which never happened as it was supposed to, due to the market crash.
    Anyway, I’m sitting in our window and all I can think about now is that romper and your skin underneath it.
    Yours,
    Dean
    That evening at the kitchen table, Miles sat across from me looking over patient records while I reread Dean’s letter over a glass of wine. My husband’s glasses crept down the bridge of his nose, and he held the weight of his chin in his hand. His exhaustion and the stress of the job were evident in his posture.
    â€œCan I get you something?” I offered, but Miles shook his head no without looking up, sighing before signing his notes.
    Upstairs, Jonah was zipped into his sleep sack, curled onto his side, and through the video monitor, I studied his profile, the aquiline nose and cleft chin a mini replica of his father’s, features I loved even more on the face of my boy for whom I would sacrifice everything.
    â€œIs there some way I can help you?” I whispered to Miles. “Maybe organize your files?”
    Again he shook his head without looking up from his paperwork, so I turned back to my computer screen and clicked on the list of Dean’s Facebook friends. Skimming through the names, I noted our mutual acquaintance, Eddie Gabes, who Dean graduated