Pieces of a Mending Heart by Kristina M. Rovison Page A

There’s nothing I’m holding back,” he continues, eyes fierce.
    Two years? I just met him! What does he mean, two years?
    Seeing my confused expression, Tristan sighs. “Kat i e, come on,” he pleads, eyes suddenly dark with pleading. “Is this your way of you telling God you want another angel?” he asks accusingly, disbelieving. He shakes his head, a smile forming. “That’s not how it works, sweetheart.”
    My face is frozen in shock, mind unable to comprehend what he’s saying. Without giving me time to process his words, he continues. “So, here’s my story,” he begins, pulling my frozen fo rm down beside him on the grass.
     
     
    Chapter 7
    Tristan
                  Katherine is more than I could have ever hoped for. I wasn’t expecting her to open up as fast as she did; I was actually prepared to beg for months for her to get to trust me. Although, she hasn’t confided in me totally just yet, but that’s understandable. I pull her down to lay on the warm grass next to me, my arm resting around her shoulders, keeping her head from laying on the hard ground.
                  The moment I saw her on our first day of school, I recognized her face. Everyone else just knew her name, but I knew something no one else did; her story, on a very personal level. I asked her to tell it to me because I wanted her to know she can trust me, but I kno w as much as she does - if not more- about her past. We lay there, watching the lone puffy cloud pass over the afternoon sun, which was beginning its descent.
                  There is no need to ready any courage; when I told her I have been waiting two years to tell her my story, I wasn’t exaggerating. These years have been filled with anxiety, hope, and longing, all amplified into extreme magnification. I felt like an ant on the sidewalk, having the light slowly fry me to death as a boy held a magnifying glass over my body. But, the light wasn’t from the sun; it was from my past.
                  I was seven years old when my grandmother died in a freak accident involving a lightning storm; she was struck while standing on her porch, calling me, telling me to get back into the house. I was terrified, so I stayed huddled under the sycamore tree in the front yard, unwilling to move. I watched her fall to the ground, head banging against the wooden floor of the porch, and I saw her not get back up. Staying under the tree, I wept until my grandfather got home.
                  I had just turned ten years old when my father died; he was a firefighter and killed in the line of duty, attempting to rescue a six-year-old girl who was hiding in her closet. He dangled her out the second-story window before dropping her, twenty feet to the ground, as the house caved in and he was buried in a pile of fire and ash. I watched him die through the footage that played live on the news. My mother became a zombie.
                  On my twelfth birthday, I watched as a man jumped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge, landing in the water below us with bone-shattering force. My mother took me to New York as a present, but I left feeling haunted by the man’s dead eyes. I will never forget the icy feeling that laced through my body as I watched him jump, and I can feel it to this day, every morning I wake drenched in sweat from a nightmare that replays the event.
                  For three years, everything was good. Great, even. My mother had a steady job, my sister was over her pre-pubescent hormone fits, and my grandfather moved in with us. My sister, Skylar, is everything to me. Was everything to me… I cared for her like she was the most precious thing in the world, and for an eleven year old, she was pretty easygoing.
                  Every day, I would walk her to and from school, and then pick her up after football practice at four-thirty. She would never object; on the contrary, she