I kept the pendant because I wasn't ready to give back the only thing I had of yours. That's not an excuse. I'm not offering it as one. I just want you to know the true reason because I'm done with every other kind.
I press my fingers against the words.
I turn the page.
Page nineteen.
You asked me once what broke. I said someone I love got hurt. That was true. What I didn't say was that I was already breaking before that. That I had been breaking for a long time. You were the first person who looked at me like they could see it anyway. I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't. But I'm done pretending I don't feel what I feel.
My throat tightens.
I turn the page.
Page twenty-three.
The library was supposed to be simple. “Find out what she knows. Get the laptop back. Leave.” That was the whole plan. It lasted approximately one afternoon before I sat down across from you and you wrote something in the margin. I read it and I thought — I'm in trouble. I knew it that afternoon. I've known it every afternoon since.
I close my eyes.
I open them.
I keep reading.
Page thirty-one.
I'm sorry about Nessa. I'm sorry about all of it, but I'm most sorry about Nessa because she was hurting and I didn't see how much. She took it out on you, and you are in a hospital bed because of something that started with me, and I will carry that for the rest of my life.
I put my hand flat on the page.
I breathe.
I turn the page.
Page forty-four.
Week two. I drove past your parents' house. I didn't stop. I saw that your light was on at two in the morning, and I thought — she's not sleeping either. That helped more than it should have.
I smile.
It comes out of me before I can stop it. I sit on the counter in the empty kitchen, and I smile at a margin note written by a man who drove past my parents' house at two in the morning to find my window, and somehow that's the thing that breaks through.
I wipe my eyes and turn the page.
Page fifty-two.
I went to the library. Third floor. Our carrel. I sat there for two hours on a Tuesday, and I read what I wrote in the margins of my own book, and it wasn't the same. It wasn't even close to the same. I don't know what that means.
Scribbled further down on the page:
I know exactly what that means.
Page sixty-one.
You said you felt like you could see my soul. In the park. You said it quietly and I don't think you meant for me to hear it but I did. I've been thinking about it since. I've been thinking about whether that's true. Whether there's something there worth seeing. I think you're the only person who has ever looked long enough to find out, and I think that's the most terrifying thing anyone has ever done to me.
I'm not smiling anymore.
But my eyes are burning. I am not going to cry, I am absolutely not going to cry, I have cried enough in the last six weeks to last me a considerable amount of time—
