Vacant Heart

Chapter Thirty

⚠️This chapter contains mature elements, involving the death of a child. Proceed with caution. ⚠️

Every story has a beginning.

Aidan's goes way back.

Usually, these stories involve a doting or absent family, a pleasant or rocky childhood, usually somewhere steps are taken in the direction of adulthood, where you can rule your own life and not focus so much on what brought you up to there.

In my own story, that moment was when I knew my father was never coming back. My mother was on her own, and if she didn't realize it as well, she'd always be. In that fateful moment, where fireworks split open the back of my brain, forcing me to see all the useless time I'd spent longing for something unreachable, and something I probably wouldn't even want if it were offered—another claimant of my existence to know and care for me—it all became so clear.

I was a girl no longer, and I set out to take charge of my own fate, ensuring the one that happened to me would never repeat. I'd never be helpless.

I went to school, procured a great job and rose high with accomplishments for my hard work. My life became as normal as I wanted it to be. Now, I have learned from my past, and grown from it. 

And my story is truly like so many others. I'm not the first girl whose father didn't want her. I'm not the first girl who spent her teenage years trying to understand the fact. I'm also not the first girl to rise above the faults of a parent.

I'm just like everyone else.

The man...the man in front of me is not. And as I watch him, watch him prepare to give me his own story, one that he hasn't grown from—but is one that has hindered him—it dawns on me that Aidan Hughes is about to tell me something that he is digging out of the deepest part of his body, and that surfacing this information may potentially harm him.

By the distant uncertainty fleeting across his features, his eyes so lost scouring my apartment for some sort of connection, something to latch onto because my face has clearly become impossible to focus on, I'm positive he's thought of that too.

My hands are clasped in my lap, my spine stiff in anticipation. He asked me to sit, so I did.

All I can think of is the fact that he's told me he may not be able to stay, that he's entrusting me with this knowledge purely to prove that he is capable of putting his worst secrets, his worst memories into my hands, to prove he can trust me.

And as much as I wish I could tell him he doesn't have to do this, that I will stay without it, my desire to know his soul is too great. Aidan is in constant pain. Whatever lies behind his words now are the cause of it. As far as I know, he hasn't seen a therapist, hasn't spoken of this to a soul other than Victoria and some person named Mel. Releasing it onto someone on the outside of his usual spectrum may actually help him.

He ticks his mouth with his fingers, and gazes up to the ceiling, a gust leaving his chest.

"I'll have to go back...because," he says, his voice weakened by lack of breath. His eyes squint with remembrance as he takes himself elsewhere, leaving me in this room, "because Nora has been apart of my life since the start."

Towering by my fireplace, which he lit before I'd even walked through the door, he leans into it, nodding to himself. I'd imagine what his brain seems like in this moment, but I'm sure it would be dizzily frightening.

This story ends with the death of his wife and child.

There is no happy ending.

"Nora was my best friend," he says, telling me a great deal just by how soft and sweet his voice lowers, how his mouth curves upward for a fleeting second before it disappears for good. "Our fathers were close. His father at the time worked for mine as a campaign manager. I never knew life without his daughter. We-we went everywhere together, spent every summer, every break from school with each other."