Sweet Song (38 page)

Jenny collapsed onto him. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “How could you know?”

Her understanding, her forgiveness, broke the logjam inside him. Finally, it truly wasn’t his fault.

He held onto Jenny, his arms across her back. He felt her shiver and cry. She cried for him. She wasn’t going to expose him, or kill him, or run from him. There was a release that happened inside Leon that pulled him together, drew all the pieces that had been taken from him, little by little, and drew them back to him. His own tears dried.

There were still questions inside him. “What, now, shall we do?”

Jenny looked into his face and asked the one question he couldn’t answer himself, the one question he’d asked over and over again his entire life: “Who do you want to be?”

In that moment, he knew that he needed to honor his past, yet move into his own private future. “Leon. . . Leon White.”

She then let him pull her onto his lap, and they stayed together for a long while.