Silently, I nodded.
So did Lana. “I might have only been here two seconds, Cora, but I know you. Iwasyou, okay?” Her smile beckonedme closer, and soon enough, I was sitting back down beside her. “I just want to help you feel normal again.”
Helplessly, I shrugged. “I…”
The words caught in my throat.
“I don’t remember what normal feels like anymore.”
Lana’s deep brown eyes softened. “You won’t—not for a while. And that’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” I shook my head. “It’s not fair.”
My hands ran over my face, then through my hair.
“Why was it me?”
She gripped my hands. “I asked myself that every day after it happened. And I’m still not sure I have the answer.”
I sniffled. “That’s… comforting.”
Her chuckle was like sunlight. “It’s the truth. And honestly, I think that’s what you need right now.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“And while I can’t give you all the answers,” she went on, “I figured I could let you in on the important ones.”
“Like?”
She let her hands slip from mine and gave a small shrug. “Well, for starters, you need to know this wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything to deserve what happened.”
I nodded. “I think… I’m slowly figuring that out.”
“Good.” Her smile curled as her palms ran down my arm. “And don’t be afraid of the bad days. You might feel like one bad moment can knock away all the progress you’ve made, but it doesn’t. It’s still there. Your body and mind just need time to heal. Setbacks arenormal.”
“What about… permanent setbacks?” I asked quietly.
“You mean the painting thing?”
I nodded.
She let her smile soften. “Marcus told me about it. From what he said, you were getting better, right?”
My head dropped. “I was. Now it feels like I’m back at square one.”
She shook her head. “You feel that way because deep down, some part of you thinks you should feel guilty for moving on.”
My brows furrowed, and she kept going.
“I did the same thing—but with the people in my life.”
If her chuckle was sunlight, then her sighs were winter blizzards. Her expression grew distant, touched with sadness, like a storm cloud had made a home above her head.
“There was this one time, a few months after what Javi did, when I caught myself laughing. Just… laughing, at something completely stupid with one of my friends. And it hit me—I was moving on. And back then, I confused moving on with forgetting. So I sabotaged myself for months. I felt guilty for continuing my life, for feeling joy when something awful had happened to me. I stopped talking to my friends. My family. I hibernated in my apartment. I moved to a different country. I did everything I could to get away from my normal because I thought that was the only way I could protect myself.”
She sucked in a breath. “It sounds stupid. Because it was. But my head was so foggy back then, nothing ever made sense.”
She paused, her voice quieter now.
