“I couldn’t let that touch what was happening to me. I couldn’t let him —”
He stops.
“Your dad,” I say quietly. “You were protecting us from your dad.”
He doesn’t confirm it.
He doesn’t have to.
“I did it for my dad.”
What he said weeks ago in this room.
The sentence he closed a door on.
Now I have the whole thing.
• • •
I sit with it.
All of it.
The boy next door who came through my window and let me love him in every way I knew how and never told me why he couldn’t love me back the right way.
Not because he didn’t want to.
Because he was protecting me.
Because loving me the way he wanted to meant bringing me close to the thing he’d been surviving.
And he would rather break both of us than let that happen.
So he pretended he didn’t love me.
Pretended he was with someone else.
Pretended he didn’t care.
• • •
I understand it.
And I am so angry.
“You should have told me.”
“Ro —”
“I was there.” My voice is shaking now. “I was right there. You mean to tell me I was just next door while he was— I would have—”
“I know.”
“Don’t say I know. Stop saying I know like that’s an answer. You let me think —” I stop. Breathe. Start again. “You let me think for years that your mom got sick. You let me believe that. I cried for her. I held you while you cried for her. And you were carrying this entire other thing and you never —”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could have.” I am crying now. I don’t know when I started. “You could have told me. I was eight years old and I would have held it. I was eleven. I was fourteen. I was sixteen. Every single age I was, I would have held it for you. Did you know that? Did you know I would have done that? Because I loved you so much, Cassian. I would have never let you hold that all alone.”
