I tried. God, I tried everything I could think of. I knocked on his door every hour, offering food, offering to watch movies, offering to sit in silence if that's what he needed. But he wouldn't answer, wouldn't engage, wouldn't give me any opening to reach him.
By seven o'clock, my parents were getting ready for their dinner plans with friends. Their companions would be picking them up, which meant the car would be available all night, just as it had been in the original timeline.
I sat in the living room pretending to watch television, but my attention was entirely focused on listening for Leo's movements upstairs. My hands were sweating so profusely that I had to keep wiping them on my jeans. The wait was torture. Each minute stretched into an eternity.
My parents left, and my anxiety grew more and more.
When I finally heard the bathroom door open and close, I knew it was time. I quietly made my way upstairs and positioned myself outside the door.
I knew what was happening in that bathroom. I'd lived this scene before, had found him too late the first time, had spent ten years wondering if those extra five minutes would have made a difference.
This time, I wouldn't wonder.
After fifteen minutes of silence, I began knocking softly. "Leo, let me in."
Nothing.
"Leo, please. Let's talk."
I heard the unmistakable sound of quiet sobbing from inside, the kind of cry that came from the deepest place in a person’s chest, where words can’t exist anymore. My throat closed. But I didn’t stop trying.
I knocked again.
"Leo?"
The door opened slowly. He was holding an empty pill bottle in his trembling hand. His eyes were red and swollen and distant, like he wasn't really seeing me, like I was a ghost standing in front of him, as he'd already left this world even though his body was still here.
I could see more empty containers scattered across the bathroom floor, just as there had been before. And for a moment, I was eighteen again, standing in that exact doorway, almost too late.
The memory and the present moment overlapped until I couldn't tell which was which.
But this time was different. This time, I'd been prepared. This time, the bottles weren't empty because he drank them all. They were empty because I threw all the pills away this morning.
"How did you know?" he asked with a broken voice.
"How did I know?" I almost laughed, and it came out like a sob. "Because you've been struggling for days, and even though you keep telling me you're fine, I know you. I know this isn't really you. And I knew that even though right now you feel like this was your only option, you were going to regret it and ask for help."
That morning, I'd gone through every medicine cabinet in the house and flushed all the pills down various toilets. I couldn't control my brother's desperation to feel relief, but I could control what tools were available to him in his darkest moment.
My actions were the only thing I had power over.
He blinked hard, and a tear ran down his cheek. Then another. Then he broke. He collapsed to the floor, his body wracked with uncontrollable sobs. The sound that came out of his mouth shattered me. It was raw, desperate, ugly, thecrying of someone who didn’t want to die, just couldn’t stand existing.
"I can't take it anymore, Lily. I just can't."
I immediately dropped down beside him and pulled him into my arms. I wanted to hold every broken piece and stitch it back together, but this was something a bandage would not patch. "That's not true, Leo. You don't want to end everything; you want the pain to stop. And that's completely different. You just want peace."
He shook his head against my shoulder. "Will it ever stop?"
"Of course it will. I promise you that. And I'm here to do everything in my power to make it happen. Everything is temporary, even the suffering. There are pains we've experienced in our lives that we don't even remember now. And I assure you, at some point, this will be one of them."
"But I can't live in a world where people like Oliver exist."
My breath caught. They were exactly the same words he'd spoken ten years ago. The words that had lit the fuse of my rage and sent me walking to Oliver's house later.
This time, though, hearing them didn't ignite the same fury. Instead, they filled me with a bone-deep dread, because I knew exactly what they meant for him, and for me.
"You don't mean that," I said, stroking his hair to try to comfort him.
