"Sarah?" I crouched beside her desk, keeping my voice gentle. "Do you need help with the problems?"
She looked up. The expression on her face, filled with betrayal, stole my breath.
"No."
"Are you sure? I could?—"
"I said no."
She turned away, shoulders rigid, shutting me out with the same finality I'd used on her. The irony was not lost on me. I'd taught her this. I'd shown her exactly how to build walls.
After the final bell, I stood at my window and watched them in the parking lot. Cole was kneeling in front of Sarah, his hands on her small shoulders, his face serious but kind. He was talking to her, I could see his lips moving, see her nodding listlessly in response.
Then he stood and took her hand. His large, calloused fingers engulfed her small ones. They walked to his truck together, and the sight of her defeated posture, shoulders slumped, head down, feet dragging, tore my heart into pieces.
A tear splashed onto the spelling test I was holding. Then another. Tommy's red 'A' blurred and swam.
"Oh God," I whispered. "What have I done?"
The school emptied. The janitor's cart rattled past my door. The building fell into that heavy, echoey silence of after-hours.
I couldn't hold it together anymore.
I grabbed my bag and walked, then ran to the staff restroom at the far end of the hall. The one no one used. I locked myself in the last stall and collapsed against the wall.
The sobs came without warning. Violent, wracking things that tore up from somewhere primal. I slid down until I was sitting on the cold tile floor, knees drawn to my chest, crying harder than I had since Lily's funeral.
I cried for Sarah. For the light I'd extinguished in her eyes. For teaching her that love was conditional, that people who claimed to care would eventually leave.
I cried for Cole. For his patience, his hope, his steady presence that I'd pushed away because I was too scared to deserve it.
I cried for Lily, whose death I'd been using as an excuse to stop living. For my mother, whose memory deserved better than a daughter who'd given up on joy.
"You're not protecting yourself from loss," I said out loud, the words bouncing off the tile walls. "You're creating it. You're the one doing this."
The truth I'd been running from for two weeks, for fourteen months, really, finally caught me.
I wasn't protecting anyone. I was destroying everything. I was so afraid of the mountain taking the people I loved that I'd become the mountain myself—cold, indifferent, deadly to anything that tried to grow near me.
I thought of Cole's words:Grief is the price of love. But the alternative, never loving anyone, that's not avoiding grief. That's just grieving in advance.
I was grieving people who were still alive. Mourning a future I'd invented. Punishing everyone, including myself, for losses that hadn't happened yet.
And in the process, I'd created a real loss. A devastating, actual loss. A little girl who threw crayons and said people always leave. A good man who looked at me like I'd broken his heart but still said my name with kindness.
The bathroom floor was cold and hard and probably disgusting. I didn't care. I sat there until the tears slowed, until my breathing steadied, until the storm inside me finally quieted enough to think.
I had a choice.
I could stay here, in this self-made prison of fear and isolation. I could keep pushing away everyone who tried to love me, keep proving to Sarah that her worst belief was correct. I could die alone and safe and utterly miserable, having protected myself from nothing except happiness.
Or I could be brave.
The thought terrified me more than any mountain trail ever had. Being brave meant being vulnerable. It meant opening my hands and accepting that I might get hurt. It meantclimbing toward something beautiful even though the path was dangerous.
I pulled my phone from my pocket with shaking hands. Cole's contact stared up at me. His name. His number. The thread of texts that had gone silent two weeks ago.
My thumb hovered over the call button.
