I wasn’t sure if it was.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Walker went on. “I know I gave up the chance to be forgiven the minute I did what I did. I didn’t want you to forgive me. That’s why I never even tried. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I’m not looking for that. I just ... wanted you to know.”
“Know what?”
“That I was sixteen, and my best friend who was like a brother to me had an eighty percent chance of dying. And he wanted you—and I wasn’t going to fight him for you. And I honestly thought that maybe ... maybe you really could become the thing he had to live for.”
I took that in. Then I said, “So he walked in right after you pulverized my heart, and he asked me to junior prom. And I said yes for revenge. And then he kept asking me out. And we wound up dating for the rest of high school.”
“Yes,” Walker said, confirming the facts.
“And how did you feel about that?”
“I was in agony,” Walker said. “The entire time.”
“But you stayed friends with him,” I said.
“Of course.”
“And we both looked after him,” I said, “and we ignored each other.”
“And then they tried that experimental treatment ... and he defied all the odds and lived.”
“He defied all the odds and lived,” I agreed. “And then he broke up with me before we went off to college. Which was fine.”
Walker nodded. “And he’s well now.”
“He’s well now,” I agreed. “And I’m so glad about that.”
“Me, too.”
“But I’ll tell you something,” I said. If we were stating the facts, there was one more that needed to go on the record.
“What?” Walker asked.
I held his gaze for a second and let the mountain air swirl all around us. Then I said, “I never loved him back.”
Walker held still. “You didn’t?”
“I liked him,” I said. “I looked after him. I wished him well.”
“You did do all those things. Thank you.”
“But the person I wanted,” I confessed at last, “was you.”
Turnaround Pass was technically big enough for the both of us, but barely.
I made Walker scatter his ashes on the other side of the peak.
I wasn’t still angry at him, exactly. I just needed a moment to myself.
It was a lot to take in. I’d knownwhatWalker had done for so long that I barely remembered not knowing. But I hadn’t knownwhy.
And now it felt like the why might change everything.
Instead, I found a flat rock, and I sat down with my dad, staring at the bag of ashes in my hand. I hadn’t taken a good look at it until now. I guess I’d expected something like fireplace ashes—whispery and light. That’s not what human ashes are like. They’re heavy and grainy and sandy. They have fragments of bone. When you scatter them, they don’t float up toward the heavens like wishing lanterns. They succumb to gravity and splatter to the ground—leaving your hand weirdly sticky in the process.
But I put all that off as long as I could.
