Not the quiet kind, I feel Hayden's arm come around me, his hand at my shoulder, and I press my face into my own hands, and I cry at the kitchen table of the family I destroyed.
"I'm sorry," I manage, which is completely inadequate and the only thing I have.
"Don't apologize," his dad says. "Not in this house. Not anymore."
I look up at him through blurry vision.
"You're one of ours now," he says. “That's not a conversation. That's just the way it is."
The sob that comes out of me is embarrassing, and I don't care even slightly.
Hayden pulls me closer, and I let him and I sit in his family's kitchen, and I cry for all of it, for my mother and the bills and the years ahead and the impossible, unearned gift of being in this room with these people after everything.
"The clinic," I say. My voice is still rough. "My dad. He'll fight you on it."
His dad glances at me over his shoulder.
"He can try," he says mildly.
Something between a laugh and a sob escapes me.
Hayden makes a sound beside me that is definitely a laugh, quickly converted into something more neutral. I look up at him laughing, with his dad.
"What?" he says.
"Nothing," I say.
I look out at into the garden, and the treehouse, our treehouse. I think about two kids who used to climb up there and read books and eat stolen cookies and didn’t know yet what was coming. Who couldn't have imagined sitting in this kitchen twenty years later with everything broken.
I turn back to Hayden and his dad. "Thank you," I say quietly.
His dad sits back down across from me.
"Don't mention it," he says. Which is exactly what Hayden always says.
Dad’s quiet on the drive to the clinic. Not the fragile quiet of the hospital, this is a different quiet, and it makes me worry.
He's in the passenger seat with his eyes on the road and he hasn't said anything since we left the hospital car park twenty minutes ago, beyond a single comment about the weather that wasn't really about the weather.
Hayden’s driving, he hasn't said much either, which tells me he's clocked the quiet and is giving it room. I sit in the back, and I watch the two of them and think about how strange this moment is. I never thought we would ever be sitting in the same car together.
"How far?" Dad asks.
"Ten minutes," Hayden says.
Dad nods.
Quiet again and I look out of the window.
The clinic sits back from the road behind a low iron gate and a line of trees that are just beginning to come into bud. It's a converted building, old stone, large windows, the kind of place that looks like it’s been here a long time. There's a small car park to the side, well kept, with a path leading to the main entrance with a low ramp running alongside the steps.
Hayden pulls in and cuts the engine and for a moment we all just sit there looking at it.
"Right," Dad says.
Not an agreement. More like a man preparing himself to concede a point he's been arguing against in his own head for three days and has finally run out of counterarguments for.
I reach forward from the back seat and put my hand over his.
