This…this is what he’s been keeping from me.
“I think…” Tuck’s voice is quiet. Empty. “I think you should go.”
And just like that?—
Everything I thought we were shatters at my feet.
27
Tuck
Everything happens in a blur—Maria’s voice, the boys’ footsteps, the hollow thud of the door opening and closing like a final note I can’t take back. One second I’m standing there, the next I’m on the stairs, like my body gave out before my mind could catch up.
The house is eerily quiet as I glance at the framed pictures lining the wall beside me—snapshots of a life I’ve been happily living. I don’t mean to look for him, but I always do.
Ben.
My chest tightens, like something reaching in and squeezing my heart in a fist.
I failed him.
The thought doesn’t come gently—it slams into me. Tonight, I failed Maria. Her boys. I wasn’t there when they needed me, when it mattered.
And Marbles…
My stomach twists. He’s going to be okay. That’s what they said. He made it through surgery. But the what if presses in anyway. What if he hadn’t? What if I’d had to look at Josh and Lucas and tell them?—
No.
I drag a shaky breath into my lungs, but it doesn’t fill the hollow inside me.
“Tuck.”
Kate’s voice is soft, careful, like she’s afraid I might shatter if she says it too loud. She sits beside me.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
I swallow, my throat tight, raw. “Josh’s game…” My voice sounds distant, like it’s coming from somewhere outside me. “Marbles…he got loose.”
“Shit,” Nicklas mutters somewhere near the door, and I’m not even sure I realized he was here. “What can I do to help, Tuck?”
I shake my head, staring at nothing. “He’s going to be okay. He had surgery.”
“Okay,” Nicklas says quietly.
There’s movement—Kate standing, murmuring something low to him. A moment later, the door opens and closes again and then it’s just us.
My sister and me. She knows…she knows what this means, what it feels like.
“Tuck,” she says gently. “She didn’t know.”
It’s a statement, not a question. “No,” I say, my voice barely holding together. “She didn’t know.” That’s because I never told her.
Kate sits back down beside me, closer this time, and I fold in on myself, elbows on my knees, face buried in my hands. I press my palms into my eyes like I can block it all out—the past, the guilt, the memories that won’t stop replaying.
“When you first told me about Maria and the boys,” she says quietly. “It scared me.”
“Yeah, I know. It scared me too. I didn’t want…I tried not to…”
