“Protecting me?” she said in disbelief. “You fucked me up.”
“No,” Noah exploded. “No. I didn’t. It wasn’t perfect, but I left you unharmed, surrounded by your family. Whatever you define as fucked-up, I guarantee it was a relative breeze compared to what it could have been if we’d—”
He cut himself off, running a hand over his face.
“Wow, great apology,” said AJ. She was getting to him.
“I’m not sorry,” said Noah. “I did the best I could, and I did the right thing.” He plunged his hands into his pockets and walked over to the glass door. He stared at his own reflection then drew the curtain over it. He didn’t turn around.
AJ stood watching his back. Then she asked the question that had festered inside her for seven years. “So what happened?”
For a moment, Noah didn’t respond. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
But part of him did. Part of himreallydid.
“Everything was fine and then one day it wasn’t,” said AJ, speaking to that part. “That night—”
“Leave it alone,” he said quietly. “Please.”
“No,” said AJ. “You owe me this much. If you didn’t have a good reason—”
“I had a good reason,” said Noah, turning to face her, his eyes set. “But knowing it won’t make this better.”
“Tell me,” said AJ, her voice trembling.
He sighed in frustration. “This isn’t the conversation you think it is.”
“And what conversation is that?” AJ fired back.
“The one where I eventually confess to some stupid-but-forgivable thing I did when I was twenty-one, and you get to punish me until you can reconcile how much I hurt you with how much we want to fuck each other, and then we get to start over like nothing ever happened.”
AJ glared at him, refusing to show her shock at this outburst. “Okay,” she said defiantly. “So what conversation is this, then?”
Noah paced back toward the glass door. That inner blackness was shaking now, glowing rivers of pain flowing out like lava. He took his hands from his pockets and ran them both over his face. When he turned back to her, his eyes were glistening.
“Damn it, AJ, you don’t know what you’re asking,” he said, his voice breaking. “I can’t. I won’t. You’ll never look at me the same again.”
There was no melodrama in his words, and alarm bells began to chime in AJ’s gut. A few fantastical possibilities flashed through her mind. Had he committed an unforgivable crime?
As she felt that dark wound weep inside him, a white calm overtook AJ, the kind she often felt during Emily’s tantrums. She sat down on the bed and looked at her hands.
“Try me,” she said finally.
Noah inhaled sharply. He was going to leave. AJ couldn’t breathe.
Then his shoulders stooped, and a look of exhaustion passed over his features. He sank down beside her, his enormous hands resting on his thighs. That dark expanse had begun to quiet, ash snowing down to cover the pain. AJ realized she could sense it because they were actually getting closer. As they reached the shadow’s edge, Noah gave her one last look.
Then he took her inside.
“Have you heard of Huntington’s disease?”
Slowly, AJ shook her head.
Noah nodded. “It’s a neurodegenerative disorder,” he said calmly. “It’s very rare—it affects about three in every hundred thousand people. It’s progressive and it’s incurable, a combo of ALS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.”
AJ felt a buzzing at her temple. “That sounds…awful.”
Noah nodded. “That’s what my mom had.”
