To him, love destroys things. That’s what love did in his house. Love ends in sirens and kids that grow up alone and broken.
And then he met me. And he loved me. And spent too many years terrified of what that meant.
Every time he left—he thought he was protecting me.
Sixten and he’d seen his father’s face when I knocked on the door.
The grey year. He thought if he stayed he’d drag me further into the hole.
Georgetown. He stood thirty feet away from me and turned around.
The hospital. He stopped right before coming in the door because coming through it meant I’d let him back in and hurt myself again.
He thought he was protecting me from the dark house and the broken things and everything he really believed he was made of.
And the devastating, unbearable, beautiful truth is that he was wrong.
He was so completely wrong.
Not because his darkness isn’t real.
It is.
It’s real and heavy and has cost both of us more than I can calculate.
But the darkness never hurt me. I can take every piece without flinching. I told him that in every way I know how.
It was the leaving that hurt me. What I cannot handle is the absence of him.
What my chest doesn’t know how to survive is the nothing. The space to be okay without him.
The locked window with no tap.
As if I have ever been able to be okay without him. As if okay has ever meant anything to me when he wasn’t in it.
I think about my mom.
She knew.
She always knew.
She saw the way he went still when he would hug her.
She understood something I'm only just starting to understand now.
Some people love so loudly on the inside that all you can see from the outside is the quiet.
I put the flower on my nightstand and wait.
Because he always comes back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD
• • •
He comes that night.
