“In hindsight, he was. Anyway, he drove me home later that night, or by that time, it was early morning, three thirty-seven to be exact. My mom had found me missing from my room. My dad called the cops and she got in the car to look for me. She was less than a mile from the house when . . .” A lump forms in my throat, and I try to breathe through it. I’ve told the story enough times—to my psychiatrist, Dad, Rich, law enforcement—that I can do it without getting emotional. Just the facts. But it isn’t working at the moment. “Less than a mile when . . .”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“I killed her.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
“I’m the reason she’s dead. Same thing.”
He cups my face. I think I hear a lump in his throat when he says, “You made a mistake. You were a kid.”
I cry. I haven’t cried for my mom in a long time. Too long. I’m not even sure it’s her loss I’m mourning.
Finn strokes my hair. “That’s it. Let it out.”
“It happened the weekend before Christmas. Bobby’s dad was a politician and my parents had been regulars on the social scene. They tried to keep it quiet, but it was too juicy. Some local tabloids picked up the story. They claimed I was an out-of-control, sex-crazed teenager who’d seduced the senator’s son and disgraced her poor, widowed father. That’s part of why I’m adamant about staying anonymous.” My classmates were sensitive to my mom’s death until a certain point. Many of them also believed what they read, as if I’d led some kind of secret life that’d killed my mother and made Bobby into a real live bad boy. “I was institutionalized for depression by mid-January.”
Finn stops playing with my hair. “Like a psych ward? Jesus.”
“My dad had to carry me to the car and then into the facility because I couldn’t get out of bed. I was there less than a month, even though I wanted to leave from the moment I stepped in the door. He told everyone I went to stay with relatives.”
“That’s wrong, Halston. You were grieving, not mentally unstable.”
At the time, they were one in the same. At least, that’s how it was put to me. I didn’t get to grieve as hard as my dad, because I’d caused it. Nobody at the institution was compassionate toward me about the accident after they’d heard how I’d been involved.
“My dad didn’t know what to do with me.” I shrug one shoulder, and more wetness leaks from my eyes. “Still doesn’t.”
Finn wipes it from my cheeks with his thumb. “I know what to do with you.”
I can’t help smiling a little. When I look up at him, moonlight and tears make little crystals in my vision. “You do?”
“Mhm.” He pulls the hem of my t-shirt up my belly, just under my breasts. “Turn over and take this off.” Then he adds, sternly, “In that order. Whatever you do, don’t flash me.”
I switch sides so I’m facing his bedroom door, and together, we get the shirt over my head. He smooths my hair out of the way, then begins scratching my back as I’d done for him.
I close my eyes and shudder as I release a few silent sobs. “That feels nice.”
“Just relax,” he murmurs.
I haven’t been touched so lovingly in over ten years.
After what I just confessed, it’s not the reaction I might’ve expected from him.
It confirms what I think we both suspect.
Finn was meant to find that journal. To find me. To be a salve for, and perhaps even heal, a heart I’d worried was destined to ache forever.
16
While I scramble eggs, Marissa makes a case for owning a horse. Thing is, it’s not so far-fetched. She has friends with them. Kendra had one growing up. One of the many reasons I had to get out of that family—horses shouldn’t be standard pets.
“Do you need one to be happy?” I ask her.
“No, Dad, and I knew you’d say that. But a horse would make memorehappy.”
“How?”
“I’d get to ride it. You’re always telling me to go outside more. And some girls are so good, they’ll go to college free.”
