"Neither do you."
He picks up his fork. Eats the pasta without any more commentary. I watch him, trying not to be obvious about it. He's eating. He ate yesterday, too. Not much, but something. His color is coming back, the gray leaving his skin by degrees, like a bruise healing. Four days ago, I held a bucket while he was sick for the third time that morning, and he couldn't look at me afterwards. Now he's sitting across a table, eating pasta I burned, and making me laugh.
I don't entirely know what to do with that. With him.
We clean up together after. He washes, I dry. The kitchen is too narrow, and we keep almost touching, and neither of us acknowledges it, but I'm aware of every inch of space betweenus. The warmth coming off him. The way he moves, still careful, conserving energy like he's not entirely sure his body will do what he asks.
I think about what I read in the journals. The handwriting that got steadier as the entries went on. The way he wrote about his brothers, like they were a landscape he was always trying to map, always finding new terrain. The way he wrote about the person he was trying to be, this ideal of himself that he kept returning to, even when he was at his worst.
He's trying. He has been trying, in the dark, for years.
Nobody saw it. Or if they did, they didn't say so.
I wonder what it costs a person to keep trying when nobody sees.
When we're done, he leans against the counter, and I lean against the wall across from him, and there are maybe four feet between us, and the evening light is coming through that gap in the curtains.
"I read your journals."
It comes out before I've decided to say it. He goes still.
"The first night," I say. "At the other safe house. I couldn't sleep, and I found them in the drawer and I—" I stop. "I read three entries. The black one." I make myself hold his gaze. "I shouldn't have."
"But you did," he says finally.
"Yes."
He's quiet for a moment. Not angry, I think. Something else. Working through it.
"I started writing them when I was nineteen," he says. "First time I got clean. Six weeks. I couldn't sleep more than two hours at a stretch, so I just...wrote. About Father. About the family. About what I wanted to be when I was twelve and what I turned into instead."
"It helped?"
"Made it real. Like it actually happened and I wasn't just going mad." He folds his arms. "When I use, I lose weeks. A month, once. The journals are so I can find my way back. So I know what I said and did when I was sober. Know who that person is." He pauses. "He's better than the other one."
Something tightens in my chest. "Yes. He is."
Something shifts in his face. He doesn't look away.
"Your father," he says after a moment. "Is he the one who taught you to cook?"
"God, no. My father thinks cooking is what restaurants are for." I lean back against the counter. "My mam taught me. She used to let me stand on a stool beside her, stir things, crack eggs. I was useless at it then." I pause. "Still am, if tonight was any indication."
It's the first time I've mentioned her. I can hear it land between us, light and breakable.
"She died," I say, before he has to navigate around it. "Eleven years ago. I was fifteen."
"I'm sorry."
"Cancer, officially," I say it the same way I always say it, flat and even. "She was sick for two years before that. Slow decline." I stare at the table. "But I don't think it was only cancer."
He doesn't fill the silence with platitudes. Just waits.
"She was frightened all the time," I say. "Not of dying, not even of the cancer. Frightened of what my father's work might bring to our door. She never slept properly. Never relaxed. I'd come down in the middle of the night, and she'd be sitting at the kitchen window just watching the driveway." I flatten my hand against the counter. "I watched her disappear for two years before she was actually gone. She just...used herself up. Worrying."
"You think this life killed her."
"I think it didn't give her a chance to survive." I look at him. "That's why I was so angry about the marriage. Not because I didn't understand the politics of it. I understood every piece of it. But I watched my mother die from what this life costs, and I didn't want—"
