And then it all hits.
Everything.
Fuckingeverything.
Britt being the favorite. Never being able to match up to her impossible standards. Her suicide. My anger over it. My sense of betrayal and abandonment. The sadness at the loss of a brilliant young woman, not just my sister but my friend, someone I looked up to—a bright light in a dark world snuffed out way too soon. That's a sadness I've never let myself feel. I've been too busy being angry and denying that I’m angry—too busy pretending I don't feel anything about it at all, because I've spent so long afraid of exactly this: the breaking.
And I know why, now: I've never had anyone I trusted to hold me when I broke. Charles was wonderful. Kind, supportive, romantic. But he had no emotional depth. He couldn't have handled me breaking like this. It would have been the end of us.
But Jakob?
He just holds me through it and lets me break. I'm safe with him. He's a hard place I can break against, and the soft place I can land when I'm done.
I cry for Britt. I cry for Mom—the same confusing mixture of sad and angry. For Dad, who died of sadness. For myself, for being the only one left. For all the times I've wondered if I should just join them.
I cry for all the awful things I've seen over the last few days.
And when I'm finally done weeping, I look up at him, and I know one thing for certain:
I love Jakob.
23
UNBREAKABLE AND BRITTLE
JAKOB
It's hard to breathe.
Because, underneath all the shock and sadness I feel surrounding Brys's story, there's something else simmering inside me. An emotion I've never dared name, never had the courage to face head-on.
Yet, it's guided and shaped my every decision.
Anger.
But as my Zoom therapist once explained to me, Anger is a secondary emotion. It comes out of something else. We use anger as a displacement because anger is easier to cope with than what’s really beneath it.
In my case, only now that Brys has put it all into words do I truly understand my own emotions.
"I feel you stewing up there," Brys says, after a strangely comfortable silence of several minutes, in which she rests against my chest.
"You have helped me understand myself," I tell her. "I'm trying to process that."
She waits for me to speak, her fingers dancing in slow, idle patterns over the print of the hospital gown from chest toshoulders to stomach, always cognizant of the tender area where my wound is.
The physical pain is a constant, sharp throb under everything, but it's tolerable. Every time it starts to creep up on me and I feel tempted to ask if it would really hurt to let them hook up the IV again and pump me full of opiates that will take the pain away, I put myself back in that room, shivering on the floor in a pool of vomit and shit, hallucinating and craving and hating myself and stuck in an endless hell of misery.
This pain is far better than that.
"You asked why I don't trust," I say, eventually. "My answer was true. But…I…you made me realize that the deeper truth is that I can't trust anyone for the same reasons as you: Everyone who was supposed to love me abandoned me. I know…I know my mother's death was no one's fault. She didn't choose it. But I can't quite grasp that. I don't know how else to say it. Physically, I was sixteen when she died, but emotionally, I was much less mature than my size or years would indicate. I was a sheltered, spoiled little boy. I'd never been told no. Never experienced lack or loss or hardship. My mother loved me. Even my father, as stern and hard and serious and reserved as he was, loved me too, in his way. And then Mother was just…gone. I had no answers, no explanation. Cancer? Aneurism? Heart attack? I don't know. I will never know—the hospital where she died was destroyed in a fire, along with all their records. She was alive and well one day and gone less than a week later, and…" my eyes burn. "My father hogged all the grief."
"Jakob—ohhh, Jakob."
“He never moved from her side. I never got to sit with her and talk to her, or say goodbye. I was out of the room with my tutor or nanny—I don’t remember which—when she died. I never…I never got to say goodbye. I never got to touch her hand. Father, he pushed past me, and I followed him. It felt like I wassupposed to follow him. I barely understood that she was even dead. I tried to talk to him on the walk home from the hospital, but he didn’t answer me, didn’t even acknowledge me. He marched inside without so much as slowing down, slamming his office door literally in my face. Less than…what? Not even thirty seconds after shutting the door, I heard the gun go off. Mother flatlined, and Father shot himself less than twenty minutes later."
Brys's tears soak my shirt. "Jakob, I'm so sorry."
"For what?"
