I don't wake up on my own.
Mara does it. I find this out later — that she came back from the library at two in the morning and saw the light under my door and knocked, and when I didn't answer she tried the handle, and when she found me she called 911 and then called my dad and then sat on the floor next to me until they came.
She never told me what that looked like.
I never asked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CASSIAN
TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD
I want to tell you about Rowan Hayes.
Not what I did. Not the excuses or the reasons or all the ways I’ve been over it in my head.
Just him.
Because I think about him all the time and I don’t know what to do with that except to say it.
I have thought about him every day and every night since I was eight years old.
• • •
I think about him at the shop when its slow and the radio is on and something comes through that sounds like a song he would’ve made fun of until he knew all the words.
I think about him in the dorm when its quiet in a way that feels intentional, like the quiet is specifically shaped like his absence. I think about him at night which is always now, the sleeping-badly kind of night, the staring-at-the-ceiling kind and I run through it like I’m trying to find the place I could have done it differently.
There isn’t a place.
That’s what I keep coming back to.
There isn’t a place where a different version of me could have given him what he deserved, because the version of me that exists is the version made in that house, by those hands, in all that silence.
The empty version.
And that version of me is not safe. Not to love and be loved by. Not the way Ro loves which is completely, without reservation, with every part of himself handed over like it costs nothing.
It costs everything. And I didn’t want to take everything from him.
• • •
I’ve watched what loving costs. I grew up inside what loving costs.
Ro is the most extraordinary person I have ever been near. Not because he’s perfect.
Because he is.
But he’s also anxious about everything and nothing and he overthinks and he loves too much and gives too much and holds on too long and makes himself smaller for people who don’t deserve the full size of him.
Especially me.
• • •
But he wakes up every morning and tries. He has always woken up and tried. Through every panic attack and every dark day and every time the pills weren’t enough and every time I disappeared on him.
• • •
