“Thanks.”
“I mean it in the best way. You’ve always been full-volume, full-color. Big feelings, big loyalty, big everything. You’ve always been big enough to take up space for both of us.”
My throat tightens. “That sounds suspiciously likeexhausting, high maintenance, dramatic, loud?—”
“It means you’re fierce. You feel everything, and instead of shrinking from it, you use it. You turn it into fun and love and protection and wildly inappropriate reactions.”
I let out a watery laugh.
And I feel a piece of me heal.
May’s voice softens. “Nico isn’t scared of you. He watched you today like he wants all of it. Like he was so lucky, like you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to him. He’s a great guy—he deserves someone who loves and protects like you do. Andyoudeserve that kind of love more than anyone in the word.”
I nod. Because maybe… I do.
We fall silent again for a moment. The TV blares in the background—someone screaming about betrayal and hair extensions—but there is a kind of quiet that isn’t silence so much as a shift in temperature.
“I know that you love me. And… I know what you’ve done. But…” she swallows. “I want you to stop.”
I rear back. “What?”
“You made yourself big so I could be small.”
I blink at her.
“You were the lightning rod, so I didn’t have to be,” she says. “You took up all the air so I could breathe without being noticed. I didn’t get yelled at because you were already screaming. I didn’t get questioned because you were already in trouble. You made it easy to be the good one, because you took all the heat.”
I feel my throat tighten. “I wanted to.”
“Did you, Annie? Did you really? At the expense of your own happiness? Sacrificing yourself over and over again?—”
“I could take it, and Iwantedto, May?—”
“You were protecting me. You always have. But also sometimes… protecting me meant making all my choices for me. Even when I didn’t know it.”
I flinch a little.
May notices, but she doesn’t stop. “I let it happen. I liked that I didn’t have to be messy. I liked knowing you’d always stand in front of me if something went wrong. I liked being good.”
There’s something bitter at the edge of her voice. Not about me—but about the cost of all that goodness.
“But I’ve lived my whole life by the rules because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. Afraid of being like you. Afraid of what would happen if I weren’t good. If I didn’t make the ‘right’ choice.”
There’s a long pause. “He’s the right choice for me,” she says eventually.
Tom. She doesn’t have to say it. I read the name on her face.
“He’s… safe.”
There’s that word again, but it carries a vastly different weight than the way I just used it to describe Nico. Because “safe” got wasted the night before his wedding and is god knows where right now.
She stares at the television, her expression glassy. “He’s predictable. Respectable.”
And suddenly, I see it. The shape of her life. The rigid outlines she’s drawn around herself so nothing unexpected can slip in. The lines that have kept her calm, composed, reliable.
She picked a path. And now she’s walking it with her eyes closed.
I reach out and hook my pinky around hers. “You know I’d murder him and make it look like an accident if you asked me to, right?”
