Torn by Chris Jordan

hour, and by then we were in bed, and, come to think of it, I was still saying yes. But that’s private. You don’t need to know.
    What really matters was that Jed trusted me without reservation, holding nothing back. The proposal of marriage came with an escape clause. He was going to tell me a secret, a terrible secret, and if I wanted to back out, forget the whole thing, he’d understand.
    And that’s the thing about Jedediah; he really would have understood. Because it wasn’t just the secret, it was what it meant about our future together. Marriage would mean leaving everything behind—friends, family—and making a new life.
    First thing I asked him, joking: you mean like the witness protection program?
    He’d nodded gravely and said yes, a little bit like that, except we’ll be totally on our own. No U.S. Marshals to protect us. Nobody to give us new identities or settle us into a new life. It will all be up to us alone.
    So who did you kill? I asked.
    He’d rolled his eyes at that—he got a kick out of what he called my ‘smart-mouth jokes’—and said, it’s nothing I did, it’s who I am. Who my father is.
    So who’s your daddy? Tony Soprano?
    And that’s when he told me who his father was, and what that meant, and after he was done, as he waited gravely for my answer, I kissed his eyes and said, didn’t you hear me the first ten thousand times? The answer is yes.
    Saint Francis of Hoboken, patron saint of New Jersey, he said, regrets, I’ve had a few. Not me. Even after all we went through, I have no regrets. Not about saying yes. Not about loving Jed. Not about the life we lived, the baby we made, the time we had together. What would I be if I’d never met Jedediah? Another person, surely. Not Noah’s mother, that’s for sure.
    And if I’d known Jed would be gone in twelve years, snatched away in one terrible instant? If instead of an unforeseeable fatal accident he’d had, say, a disease that would shorten his lifespan. Something we knew about from the start. Would I have said no and saved myself the loss, the pain? No, no, no. No matter how you make the calculation—and all of this has raced through my mind a million times, in every possible variation—I would never choose to erase those years. Would never, ever wishI had taken another path. You can’t truly love someone and make a choice based on how long he might live. Love isn’t something that can be rated by Consumer Reports —go with the Maytag or whatever, because it will last the longest with fewest repairs. That’s not how it works. We like to think we’re rational creatures but we’re not. And besides, when you’re twenty, twelve years seems like an eternity. It seems, indeed, like a lifetime well worth having.
    And it was, it was. I swear on my wedding ring. So forgive me if I admit that when the smoke starts pouring from the building, my first reaction is that I’d rather die than endure this again. I simply can’t do it. If Noah doesn’t come out of that gym alive, I want my heart to stop beating. I want to go wherever he’s gone.
    It starts amid the swarm of uniforms. The county SWAT team, the state police tactical units. Deputies, firefighters, all positioned around the gym like bees desperate to return to a hive. I’m on my feet by then, with my friend Helen providing moral support, gathered with the other parents just beyond the bounds of the police barricade.
    Until that moment I thought ‘gnawing on your knuckles’ was just an expression. It’s Helen who gently draws my fist away before I draw blood.
    “That’s Tommy crouching by the exit doors,” Helen says with obvious pride. “He’s the unit expert on surveillance devices. He’s threading a fiber-optic device through the door frame, so they can see what’s going on inside.”
    “You can tell all that from here?” I ask, my eyes still blurry and swollen.
    She squeezes my hand. “Just my assumption, dear.That’s what Tommy does, so I assume