Page 119 of I Wish You All the Best

“We weren’t sure why you’d been kicked out. Neither of us wanted to assume the worst, but for a little bit, we actually considered calling the police. We didn’t, obviously.” Hannah cracks a smile. “By the time the sun came up, we knew we had to help you, no matter what had happened.”

“Hannah.” Dr. Taylor straightens in her seat, notepad and pen forgotten. “When you took Ben in, when you bought them clothes and necessities, when Thomas got them into a new school, what was your goal?”

Hannah answers without hesitation. “Protecting them.”

“Do you think a part of you was trying to make up for your absence?”

This one’s less easy. Hannah’s mouth hangs open for a few seconds, her eyes unfocused. “I … maybe.”

“Ben.” Dr. Taylor looks right at me, like her sharp eyes can see right through me. “Do you feel better? Now that you’ve told Hannah how you feel?”

“Not really,” I say. There’s just a bigger void between us now, and I don’t know what could possibly fill it.

“Do you wish you’d stayed quiet?”

“No. I am glad I said something, but I don’t know.” This has all just been really confusing, and I’m not really sure what we were trying to accomplish here.

“What do you want from Hannah now? What can she do to make you feel better?”

“I don’t really know.” I don’t want anything else from her; she’s done so much for me. “She’s the only reason I’ve made it this far.”

“There’s nothing that you can think of?”

I look at Hannah, her red-rimmed eyes, her messy hair. I’m guessing I look about the same right now. There really is no mistaking us as anything other than siblings. We have so much of our parents in us, sometimes too much.

But we can’t help it.

“No.”

“Can we talk, just for a second?” Hannah asks me when we’re back home.

“Didn’t we just do that?” I say. I don’t want to be an asshole, but I just don’t have it in me right now.

“I wanted to tell you something. Something I didn’t want Dr. Taylor to know.”

Oh.

Already my mind is racing with whatever it could be. Something so bad she wouldn’t even want to say it out loud to anyone but me?

“Is that smart? Shouldn’t we do it with her?”

“If I wanted her to know I would’ve told you both at the appointment.” Hannah’s voice is surprisingly short, but then she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and starts walking toward the kitchen. I follow her, the air between us feeling more poisonous with every step. “Sorry.”

The entire ride back home, we didn’t speak to each other. It was weird, and I was starting to feel like this wasn’t something we’d be able to fix.

“Sit down.” Hannah points to the chair at the table in the corner, the exact spot where I’d come out to her. “I haven’t told anyone this, except Thomas, and I only told him a few years ago, after we were married.”

“Okay.”

“I want to tell you about why I left the house.”

“I thought it was just because Mom and Dad were so suffocating,” I say, even though I feel like right now isn’t my time to talk.

“That was part of it, but there’s more.” She clasps her hands together.

“Okay … What was it?”

“So, about a month before I graduated, I was seeing this guy, and we decided to sleep together.”