“The few weeks leading up to Jack’s birthday are making me realize how he’d still be here if I made a different choice that night,” I say as I stare into my hands.
I let out a breath and look up at my therapist, the expression on his face indicating he knows how hard this is for me.
"If Elliot..." I stop.
My stomach fills with acid. My brother’s name leaving my mouth brings the emotions I’ve been trying to fight right to the surface.
“Take your time,” Damon says.
I clear my throat and start again.
“If Elliot hadn’t come back…none of this would’ve happened, and everything—everything—wouldn’t have shattered.”
I was only seventeen when everything changed. Elliot was an addict who couldn’t see his actions were hurting people, andmy dad had finally reached his limit and sent him packing. My brother walking out of our childhood home was the last time I saw him—until last year.
He came home just before Christmas.
Turning around and finding him at Lottie’s Scoops with a massive grin on his face… my jaw, and my ice cream, fell to the ground.
Being together in the ice cream parlor we visited so often as kids was a memory I never expected to relive.
We talked for hours.
I beamed with pride when he told me he’d been clean for a number of years and had been working on himself. It felt as though I had my brother back, and everything felt right again. And then he told me he wasn’t sticking around.
I was crushed.
He’d come back to make amends but planned on returning to Florida, to the life he’d built away from Huxley Bay.
I was hurt.
Pissed.
I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay but he wouldn’t.
He told me that he wouldn’t be coming back again and asked for a ride to the airport, but I didn’t want to watch him walk out of my life again. So I didn’t. I left him at Lottie’s Scoops.
And then, suddenly, he was gone.
Not just from Huxley Bay, but from the world.
And I’d do anything to go back and change it all.
“If I would’ve been able to accept that Elliot couldn’t start over in Huxley Bay and just dropped him off at the airport, he never would have been at Great Lakes Stadium with Jack that night and beat him to death.”
I pause and let the words ring out before continuing.
“Brodie and I wouldn’t have been out looking for Elliot when he took off, and the three of us wouldn’t have gotten into the car accident.”
My pupils burn as I remember Elliot’s body smashing through the windshield. The sound of shattering glass pierces my eardrums, as if it’s happening all over again, but I don’t stop.
“Elliot wouldn’t have died, Engine 45 wouldn’t have needed to be on the scene to help, and my dad wouldn’t have lost his life on the job, trying to save us.”
I let the words float free in the open space that mirrors a small box closing in on me with every breath I take, but I don’t find relief in airing out the truth. Instead, it tightens around me.
Damon sits there, giving me the space to get every painful and gut-wrenching thought out.
The words aren’t new—it’s not as if I haven’t said them to myself or Damon—but they leave a taste of ash in my mouth.
