Page 75 of We Are Just Us

Kieran nodded slowly. The civil version of this conversation—the measured, reasonable, I understand why you did it but it hurt me version—was right there within reach. He could take it. Be the bigger person. Have the mature conversation and then go back inside hollowed out for a week.

Instead he said, “I told you about my mom.”

Rory closed his eyes.

“I told you about not coming out to her before she died. About sitting in that hospital room for seventeen years and never saying the thing I needed to say.” His voice was steady, but it was starting to fracture. “I gave you that. The worst thing about myself. And you took it. And you gave me nothing back.”

“That’s not true.”

“You never thought to mention you were married?” The steadiness cracked. “That you had a wife? That she died? You just let me keep going, keep telling you everything, while you sat by with this whole other life I didn’t know about.”

Rory stood. Not abruptly, slowly, as though sitting became unbearable. He moved a few steps into the driveway, his back to Kieran.

“It’s not that simple,” he said.

Kieran stood too. “It felt simple enough at the Basswood. When Vera said her name and I didn’t even know who she was talking about.” He could hear his voice rising. “I found out from a stranger, Rory. In public. While you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

Rory flinched.

“And the thing that keeps going through my head…” Kieran stepped off the porch, following him into the driveway, “is that I thought what we had was equal. I thought I was showing you all of me and you were doing the same. But you weren’t. You were deciding how much I got to see, and that was it. I was standing there with everything out in the open and you were still—” He stopped. Swallowed. “You were still holding back the biggest thing.”

Rory turned around. His composure was cracking, that steady, easy surface finally giving way to the raw underneath.

“What do you want me to say?” His voice was sharper now. Edged. “That my wife died? That some drunk asshole ran a red light and killed her while she was picking up groceries?”

Kieran went still.

“She was twenty-six,” Rory said. The words came out jagged, pulled from him against his will. “We were talking about kids. About buying a house closer to her parents. And then one night she got in her car and some guy who’d had too many beers at happy hour…” He stopped. His hands were shaking. “He ran a red light doing fifty. Hit her on the driver’s side.” Rory swallowed, the sound sharp in the quiet air. “She was dead before the ambulance got there.”

The lawn mower down the street stopped. The neighborhood was perfectly still.

“I got a phone call from the hospital,” Rory said. “I drove there thinking maybe it was a mistake. Maybe they got the wrong person.” His voice went flat. Mechanical. “And then I walked into a room and identified her body and nothing was ever the same again.”

Kieran didn’t speak. The weight of it pressed against him, enormously real, but the anger was still there too, sitting right beside it, and he couldn’t make them cancel each other out.

Rory wasn’t done. The dam opened and he couldn’t close it.

“I planned her funeral,” he said. “I picked out the casket. I stood up in front of two hundred people and talked about how wonderful she was while I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. Not at her. At everything. At the universe for letting it happen. At myself for not being there. At some stranger in a bar who decided his convenience mattered more than her life.”

His voice was climbing now, not louder but thinner, like a wire being pulled taut.

“And then I fell apart. I drank. A lot. Stopped surfing. Stopped caring about anything. My sister Samantha basically moved me in with her for a year because she was afraid of what I’d do if she left me alone.”

Now his body was trembling. Not only his hands, his shoulders, his jaw, all of it.

“So don’t stand there and tell me I gave you nothing. I gave you everything I had. I just couldn’t give you that.”

The driveway was silent.

Kieran stood there, absorbing it. The grocery run and the phone call and the casket and the two hundred people. It all landed, the enormity of what Rory carried, alone, for seven years, and he still couldn’t let go of the anger.

“I didn’t know,” Kieran said. His voice was steady. Flat. “But that’s the point, isn’t it. I didn’t know.”

Rory laughed, hollow, scraped out from the bottom. “How could you? I didn’t tell you.”

They stood there in the driveway, both of them wrecked in different ways.

“The drinking,” Kieran said slowly. “That’s why you stopped.”