There were headlines, of course there were. Sabrina had built half her life online, and the internet loved a woman unraveling almost as much as it loved dragging Alyssa’s name back through a story she had already survived once. I tried to apologize for that. Alyssa stopped me before I got the words all the way out.
“She did this,” she said. “Not you.”
I knew she was right.
I knew it in the part of me that could line up facts and assign blame where it belonged. But the part of me that had picked her up off my kitchen floor, covered in blood because she loved me, would never hear it clean. Sabrina came for Alyssa because of me. I could live with the truththat it wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t sure I would ever live free of the fact that it happened because Alyssa was mine.
So I stopped apologizing out loud, and decided I would spend the rest of my life making sure being loved by me gave her more than it ever cost her.
Alyssa and Micahhad been at my place eleven nights running. Half her closet was in mine. Micah’s shoes lived by my front door, and I liked it that way.
Sunday night, we were getting ready for bed, Alyssa washing her face and brushing her teeth at my sink. I’d just finished brushing mine. Micah was already knocked out down the hall, asleep.
“I want to ask you something.” I leaned on the counter next to her.
She shut off the water. “Okay.”
“I want you and Micah to move in here. Permanently. I could hand you a lot of reasons right now. Good ones. Your lease, the drive across town, Micah’s school is closer from here. What happened to you in that building, and why you never need to step foot there again. I could lean on that one all day, tell you this is about keeping you safe, and you might even say yes to it. None of those are the reason. I want you here because this is your home. Yours and Micah’s. His shoes by the door, and random Legos on the floor. Your hair products taking over my bathroom.”
That almost got a smile out of her. I wasn’t finished.
“You two make this my home. You’re my family. That’s the reason.”
She was quiet, for a moment. “Say it again,” she said. “The last part.”
“You’re my family. I need you here.”
She turned to me, damp hand over mine and held them there. “Then we stay,” she said.
“You stay.”
55/
knocks me off my feet
THIS CHAPTER HAS A SOUNDTRACK
Knocks Me Off My Feetby Stevie Wonder
alyssa
“I can’t believeyou moved it.”
I stopped dead when I saw it.
Julian’s father’s piano, out in the open, front and center in the family room.
Julian glanced up from the karaoke machine he was setting up. “Figured it was time. It’s been hidden away long enough.”
I ran my hand over the polished mahogany.
The last time I saw it, it had been under a cloth, tucked in a closed room like something too dangerous to touch. Now it sat where it belonged, buffed to a warm glow, the inscription clear on the fallboard.
“How do you feel about having it out here?”
He stopped untangling a microphone cord and looked at it for a second.
“Different,” he said. “Good different.”
