I felt bad about such a pitiful update, so I've finished chapter 16, and I'm adding it too. I'm not sure how long it will be before you find out about Jack's idea, but it should be worth the wait, hopefully. I've started writing Sawyer's next appearance, so that should be next chapter. I wasn't going to bring him back, but everyone kept mentioning it, so I thought I should show you guys how he's handling the break up. Plus, it's a small town. They're guaranteed to run into him again eventually.

Chapter 16. Closure

True to his word, Jack went to the house the next morning, after he dropped Kate off at work. She looked confused, disappointed even, he thought, when he didn't follow her into the diner as usual, so he told her he had some business to finish up with his father, and this seemed to allay her curiosity. He felt bad for lying to her, especially now that she was starting to open up with him, but he told himself it was the best. He had to get to that house, and he was certain that if she knew what he was up to, she'd try to stop him. She'd tell him that it was in the past, that it didn't matter anymore, but it did, because she wouldn't sell it, because she insisted on prolonging her pain by holding onto something that wasn't worth holding onto.

Once she'd accepted his excuse, and they'd parted ways, Jack walked back across town, heading down that road for the first time in twenty years. A few more houses had sprung up over time, but all in all, the neighbourhood was pretty much the same: dirty, cheap, a provincial slum. The kind of place where people's sense of self-worth was even lower than the property values, adding to the violence that small town life seemed to breed.

Kate's house was at the end of a dirt road, a few hundred yards from the nearest neighbour. It was no wonder, Jack realised, that no one had ever known what went on behind its doors. It hadn't seemed that far away from everything when they were kids.

The yard was overgrown, liked he'd imagined, tree roots splitting open the pipes, which were already rusted from decades of neglect. One of the windows was smashed, so Jack cleared away the glass, climbing through into the master bedroom.

He felt a shudder of revulsion go through him as he looked around at the cheap blinds, the rumpled sheets, the pile of empty bottles by the bed, wondering if this was where it had happened, or across the hall in her own room. He remembered when they were eleven, how he'd helped her put a dead bolt on her door; it hadn't saved her, hadn't kept him away, though at the time, he'd been too young to fully understand her fears.

If he had, would it have made a difference? he wondered. But he knew deep down that it wouldn't. He was just a kid. He couldn't have stood up to Wayne. She was braver than him, and she'd failed.

It made him angry, standing there in the room where Wayne had slept off his drunken stupors, free from the nightmares Jack knew she still suffered, so he went across the hall to her room, surprised to see how little she'd taken with her when she left. The room was pretty much as it was the last time he'd been here: small and Spartan, with no posters on the wall, or pictures of family and friends. The only decorations she'd ever put up were postcards and travel brochures she'd collected, tacking them to the plaster above her bed to remind herself that there was a world outside this town, she just had to wait a little longer to see it. She was supposed to leave when she was eighteen, but this place had broken her long before that.

They were gone now, though Jack could still see the marks on the wall, along with the one left by the map she'd hung above her desk, where she'd circle places she wanted to go. He wondered if Wayne had destroyed them, along with that dream, or if she still had them somewhere, boxed up like the letters they'd written each other. He didn't think she would have thrown them away; they were her lifeline once, her hope. Even if she'd never visited any of the places she'd dreamed of, she hadn't given up that up. He could see it in her eyes when he talked to her about L.A. She still wanted to leave, she just didn't know how to break free of the hold this place still had on her.

Wandering through the rest of the house, seeing the pile of old magazines still on the table, the dishes no one had ever bothered to put away, the faded pictures on the fridge, Wayne's boots by the door, Jack finally found the answer he was searching for. He wasn't sure it would work, but it was worth a try. Like his father, her parents had died before she had the chance to confront them, to get the answers she needed, but maybe, just maybe, he could still give her the closure she craved, the closure to move on, and finally start her new life.