“Different,” I corrected him carefully. “But yeah, better in its own way. You looked like you were exactly where you were supposed to be up there.”
He went quiet for a second, staring down into his cup like the answer to whatever he was thinking might be floating in the flat ginger ale. Then he laughed, and the sound came out soft and a little broken around the edges. “That's generous as hell. Most nights I feel like I'm faking it and just hoping nobody notices I have no idea what I'm doing.”
“You're not faking it.”
“You don't know that for sure. You only saw one show.”
“I've been listening to your band for months,” I admitted, and I watched his head snap toward me with his eyes going wide in surprise. “I've had Static Bloom on rotation since last summer. You guys are good.”
“You're joking.”
“I'm not.”
“That's...” He trailed off and shook his head like he couldn't quite process what I'd just told him. “That's fucking surreal, Rook.”
“Yeah, well. Welcome to my life for the past week.” I took another drink of the ginger ale and immediately regretted it because the stuff was getting worse the longer it sat in the cup. “Finding you after looking for you for years felt pretty fucking surreal too.”
I watched his expression shift from surprised to something that looked like guilt mixed with grief mixed with too many other things to name all at once.
“I'm sorry,” he said quietly, and the words came out so soft I almost didn't hear them over the wind. “For disappearing the way I did. For not saying goodbye. For all of it.”
I should have said it was fine, that it was water under the bridge, that it was ancient history we didn't need to dig up anymore. But the anger I'd been carrying for too damn long wouldn't let me do that.
“You vanished. One day we were fine, and the next day you were just gone. No explanation, no warning, no nothing. Just an empty house and years of wondering what the hell I did that was bad enough to make you disappear like that.”
“You didn't do anything wrong.” He said it fast and desperate, like he needed me to believe it more than anything else in the world. “Rook, you didn't—it wasn't about you at all.”
“Then what the hell was it about?” I turned to look at him fully now, and I could see the way he flinched under the weight of my stare. “Because I spent years trying to figure it out. Went over every conversation we'd ever had, every time I fucked up or said the wrong thing, every single moment where I might have pushed too hard or not hard enough. And I couldn't find it. Couldn't find the thing that made you decide I wasn't worth a phone call or a text or a goddamn explanation about why you left.”
“It wasn't about you,” he repeated, and his voice cracked on the words as he looked away toward the stars like they might save him from having to meet my eyes. “It was never about you, I swear.”
“Then what the fuck was it about?”
He was quiet for a long time after that, staring up at the stars like they might have an answer he couldn't find anywhere else. I watched him in the moonlight and tried to read what was happening behind his eyes, but he'd always been better at hiding when he needed to.
“You see that constellation up there?” he said finally, pointing at a cluster of stars I couldn't quite make out. “The one that looks like it's broken in half?”
I squinted up at where he was pointing and tried to find whatever pattern he was seeing. “I guess?”
“We used to look at that one all the time when we'd come here,” he continued, and his voice had gone softer now, almost distant. “You'd always say it looked like a straight line, and I'd tell you it was more like a curve. Remember that?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn't entirely sure I did. We'd looked at the stars plenty of times, but I couldn't remember which ones we'd argued about.
“The thing is, we were both right.” He dropped his hand back down and wrapped his arms around his knees, making himself smaller. “From where we sat, it looked one way. But if you moved even a few feet to the left or right, the whole shape changed. Same stars, completely different picture depending on where you were standing.”
I waited, not entirely sure where he was going with this but knowing enough about how his brain worked to understand he'd get there eventually.
“That's how I felt back then,” he said quietly. “Like you were looking at my life from one angle and seeing this straight line, this path forward that made sense. And I was looking at the same fucking thing from a completely different spot and seeing it all falling apart. Same situation, totally different view.”
I still didn't fully understand what he was trying to tell me but I could feel that he was working his way toward something big.
“Soren—”
“Do you know what it's like to have your parents get drunk all day and do fuck-all to take care of you and your siblings?”
I opened my mouth to answer before realizing I didn't have one. Didn't have a single fucking thing to say that wouldn't sound hollow or stupid or painfully inadequate compared to what he was asking.
“Right before graduation,” Soren continued, and he was still staring at the stars instead of looking at me, “my parents disappeared into their own shit and just left us there. Stopped showing up at all. Stopped paying the bills, stopped buying food, stopped pretending they gave a damn whether we lived or died. And I was eighteen by then, so I became the grown-up by default because there wasn't anyone else to do it.”
