EASTON
On the night Kevin burst into my room, I’d just finished the first two years of med school. I’d be leaving for a paid internship in Colorado soon, one that would help me land a residency the following spring, but I had three weeks back home first, three weeks during which I planned to avoid my brothers if possible.
A smarter girl wouldn’t have come home at all. Kevin and Sean were a danger to everyone they came into contact with. I came because of Elijah. Elijah, who’d been dancing around me for years—close and seemingly interested, but never making his move. I just couldn’t miss what might be my last shot for a while.
I should have run the minute Kevin flipped on my light and told me they needed me. I should have run as hard as I could to the Cabots’ house and gotten on the next plane out.
But I’m a stupid girl at the times when it has really mattered.
Sean was strewn across the couch, covered in blood, and one of his idiotic friends was in the big armchair across from him. Also bloody.
I couldn’t legally touch either of them without threatening everything. Sure, they’d asked for my help before, but on a muchsmaller scale: a stomach sliced open while scaling a barbed wire fence, a dog bite. Trying to deal with bullet wounds when they’d committed a felony? This was something else entirely—not only would Ineverget a residency, but I might go to jail.
I told Kevin to take them to the hospital and he wouldn’t. There’d been a string of local robberies—I’d suspected it was them, but I’d never asked—and if they showed up with gunshot wounds, it would all come out.
So I did it. I’d only worked on cadavers at that point, but I did it, and it wasn’t until Kevin said, “It’ll be real fucking handy when we finally have a doctor in the family” that it all became clear to me.
This was never going to end. And once I got my license, it would get worse: they’d be demanding oxy and morphine and Demerol and God knew what else for the rest of my fucking life.
“You willneverhave a doctor in the family,” I replied. “This is the last time I ever help either of you.”
That’s when Sean laughed, his voice slurred from something Kevin had given him. “Oh, sweetheart, that wasn’t the last time. We shot that kid, you know—no idea if he’ll live—and you just helped us conceal a crime. I could ruin your life with a single phone call.”
It took me a few days to understand the hole I’d dug myself into. That if I ever got my medical license, my brothers and everyone they associated with would spend their lives blackmailing me with what they knew.
So I pivoted. I blew off my residency and got a PhD and let everyone think I’d just changed my mind.
And I thought it was a secret, but Elijah has known all of this since it happened.
He knowseverything—that it was me who burned down Jacob Tucker’s house, and that I helped Sean and Blaze hide what they’d done—not that I had much of a choice.
“I didn’t give my mom and Kelsey the specifics,” he says. I’m still sitting on the wall, shell-shocked. He stands before me, wrapping his bowtie around my bleeding foot. “I just told them that they had to never give you a reason to visit, and that it involved your brothers. You came home anyway, I know, but we were doing our best not to be a part of it.”
So all of the people I thought hated me as a kid were rooting for me, and all of the people who hurt me—Elijah and Judy and even my father—were doing it to save me from myself.
There was the world as it actually existed, and the world as I saw it, and they had almost no overlap.
I want to argue that he could have told me the truth, but I wouldn’t have been able to give him up if he had. I’d have returned again and again, a puppet my brothers could push around at will.
A warm breeze gusts from the west. He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Why are you telling me all this now, then?” I ask. “What’s changed?”
He cups my face in his palms. “Because even if I can’t give you all the things you wanted, Thomas can’t either. I don’t want you coming to South Carolina, so we’d only see each other when I could get up to Boston, which probably means we never end up being parents, among other things. I never wanted to ask you to make that choice, but—” He shakes his head. “Even with as little as I can offer, I saw you tonight. I think I could make you happier than Thomas could. And it’s not right for me to keep making those choices for you.”
My heart hammers in my chest. I want to believe him, but we’ve been somewhere like this before. Not entirely, but close enough. This could evaporate on me, leaving me to spend the next year flattened by an abrupt end I didn’t expect.
“I already ended things with Thomas,” I tell him. When his face lights up, I shake my head. “But I’m scared to believe you.An hour ago you were telling me this could never happen. Five years ago you were telling me I’d imagined everything I thought you felt. And I get it. You had your reasons. But it’s almost impossible for me to believe that I’m not going to wake up to some new gut punch, and you’ll have your reasons then too.”
He steps closer. “Would it help if I announced it to the whole fucking world? If I told everyone back at the house that I’m in love with you?”
My breath holds. Yes, that might help. If nothing else, it wouldn’t leave me dealing with it alone if he changes his mind. I’d have a dozen other people there saying, “What the fuck, Elijah?”
“It’s not the right time for it,” I reply. “It’s Kelsey’s wedding.”
His mouth moves into my favorite of his lopsided smiles—sweet, a little sheepish. “Then I guess I shouldn’t have announced to Kelsey and my mother that I was in love with you just before I took off.”
I stare at him. “You didn’t.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. My grandmother did, and then she told me to stop wasting time and go find you.”
