“I’m sorry,” Holden said quietly. “I’m so sorry that I’ve done this to you. I’m sorry, sis. But I don’t think I can ever make it better. I can’t take that pain away from you.” His words hit me like a brick to the chest. Worse—like a truck slamming into me at full speed.
I’d been desperate for those words for so long, and I hadn’t even realized it. Not forgiveness. Not guilt. Just acknowledgement. Him seeing what his addiction had done to me. I would never hold it against him, but hearing him name it was something my soul had been quietly aching for.
“But you can make sure it never happens again,” I whispered, fighting to keep the tears from spilling over. “We both can. We can make sure neither of us ever has to feel this way again.”
Holden held my gaze for a moment, then nodded. “We can try our best. I have a lot of work to do on myself. And so do you. I don’t think our work will ever stop.”
“I don’t think it will ever stop either,” I sighed. He was right. Of course he was. Lucy had told me the same thing so many times, maybe I’d heard her, but I hadn’t truly listened.
Our pain. Our problems. Our addictions. They wouldn’t ever fully disappear.
Holden opened his mouth to speak again, but his words were interrupted by a soft knock at the door, so quiet it felt intentional, like whoever’s fist had touched the wood was acutely aware of the late hour. The sound startled me at first, before the realization of who it could be dawned on me like a sunrise.
I guess Holden came to the same realization. He let out a small chuckle instead of finishing his sentence, shaking his head slightly. “I’d guess that’s for you. I’ll… I’ll be upstairs, okay? If you need me?”
He looked down at me as he spoke, pushing himself up from the couch across from me. He waited for my nod, and when I gave it, he headed for the stairs, casting one last glance back at me, and then toward the door, before disappearing upstairs. I waited until I heard his bedroom door open and close before I stood. I took a deep breath. The feeling in my chest reminded me of the first time I’d met Austin, nervous, but this wasn’t the same kind of nerves. These ran deeper, heavier, threaded with worry.
I forced my feet to move calmly toward the door, pausing when I reached it. I stared at the wood for a second, then shook my head, and my body opened it before my mind fully agreed. The darkness of the night greeted me instead of Austin’s tall frame. Confusion pulled my face down as I glanced around the empty porch—until I saw him. He was sitting on the porch steps, turned just enough to look back at me. I could barely make out his features in the low light, but I didn’t need to see his face to know how tired he was. The exhaustion radiating from him was unmistakable.
“Hi,” I spoke first, letting the single word drift softly into the night. It felt like the smallest word that had ever existed, especially compared to all the things I wanted to say to him.
“I thought maybe you’d gone to sleep,” Austin said, and even his voice sounded tired.
“Not yet,” I shrugged, even though I wasn’t sure he could see it in the dark.
I watched as his shadow shifted, as he slowly stood. I held a breath in my chest while he walked toward me, unhurried. There were too many words left unsaid between us, too many to count. I could feel them hovering in the space between us, thick and heavy, like a mist you couldn’t see through.
“Can we talk?” Austin asked. His voice sounded unfamiliar, weighed down by something I couldn’t quite name.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Do you want to come in?” He seemed surprised by the invitation as he stepped into the light spilling faintly from the doorway. Like Holden, I could see the exhaustion etched into his face, and I couldn’t blame him for it.
“Is that okay?” he asked, glancing past me into the house, like he expected my entire family to be standing there.
“We can talk in my room,” I said, keeping my voice gentle, careful not to disturb the tension hanging between us. I knew that once it broke, there were too many things waiting to spill through.
“Okay,” Austin agreed, though the hesitation in his voice matched my own.
I stepped back inside, feeling him follow a moment later. I closed the door quietly behind us and gestured toward the stairs. He must have understood that my family was asleep, because he only nodded. I tried not to think about how strange it felt to have Austin in my house as I led him upstairs. It was such a contrast to his own place, and even though I knew better than to worry about judgment from him, I still wondered what he was thinking. We stayed silent as I opened my bedroom door for him. As he passed me, he looked back, and our eyes met. It felt the same as it always had—like there was something beneath our skin pulling us toward each other.
I sighed as I closed the door, turning toward him slowly. For a moment, he looked frozen, his eyes drifting over my room. He took in every shabby detail like he had forgotten, just for a second, about the iceberg of problems erupting in the lake between us. Then, just as quickly, he remembered.
“Blair,” he breathed my name like a sigh. I walked past him as he spoke, stopping only when I reached the edge of my bed. I sat down, wondering briefly if he would join me. He didn’t. He stayed standing in the middle of my room, looking at me like his gaze could translate all the things he didn’t know how to say. “There’s so many things I need to say,” he said carefully, regret threading through his voice, “but first I need to tell you something.”
“What is it?” I asked, bracing myself. Nothing good had ever come from Austin needing to tell me something.
“I fucking missed you,” he said.
Whatever I had been expecting Austin to say, it certainly wasn’t that. I could feel the weight of his words in his tone, and that weight landed squarely in my chest as he looked at me. I didn’t have to question whether he meant them. It was written in his eyes.
“I missed you too,” I said quickly, because it was the truth. If there was only one truth to be told tonight, it was that.
I had been missing him for a while now, not just the two weeks I was away. I had been missing Austin since the day before everything happened, since the night we kissed under the stars and everything felt so right. It felt like a dream when I looked back on it now. The ease of that night. Even with problems circling us, it felt like Austin and I had been suspended in time. Just us. No lies. No secrets.
Of course, that was never really true. The secrets and the lies had always been there, lurking beneath the surface of the water around us, waiting to pull us under. They had never disappeared. They had only waited. And that was when I realized it. Austin and I could never swim those waters together. One of us would have ended up drowning. Or maybe… maybe we already both had.
“I would have come earlier,” Austin said quietly. “I wanted to come earlier, but there were things Seren and I needed to talk about.” The guilt returned instantly. Seren’s face flashed through my mind. The pain in her eyes. The exhaustion in her body.
“I… I thought she knew, Austin,” I said softly. “I thought Seren and Zane knew about the accident. I wouldn’t have told them if I didn’t. I didn’t stay long enough to see how it ended.”
