Page 123 of All the way home

Courage is evasive, but Zach snatches at it anyway. “A pipe dream.”

Kieran’s smile—dazzling, a homing beacon—could light the world.

The quiet extends as they walk, but not uncomfortably. After a while, Zach realizes that Kieran seems to have some idea of where he’s going, so he contents himself with just following along, stealing sideways glances every so often, until Kieran comes to a stop.

Ahead, the terminal just . . . ends.

It’s the under-construction wing they’d found earlier. In the dark, it’s an impossible space. Haunted. A non-space.

A black hole.

Kieran catches his eye and grins.

“This is your idea?” Zach asks.

“Come on. Let’s see what’s going on in there.”

“What about the announcements? We probably won’t be able to hear them in there.”

Pulling his phone out of his pocket, Kieran waves it. “Ringer’s on. Rena will call.”

“Right.” Zach nods, hesitation bleeding through every inch of him.

Then, with mild trepidation, he follows Kieran into the dark.

Chapter Forty

Rena

Rena buries her face in her hands.

There’s an awful, sucking beat of silence.

Sahar doesn’t ask how it happened, or whether it was an accident. She doesn’t have to. Sahar had been there during their last year of high school. She’d seen the tumult, every instance of Kieran’s highs and his simmering lows. More important, she knows that if it was anything other than what it was, Rena would have said so.

“God,” she says after a long moment. “I’m so sorry.”

“I knew he wasn’t doing well, I just—I wasn’t looking.” Rena takes a deep breath. “I didn’t ask.”

There it is.

The details are blurry, but Rena won’t ever forget how it felt, that night. She’d called 911 before she even called for Mum, stood there in wet socks and tried to breathe. She’d felt like she’d screamed her throat raw, even though she hadn’t said a word except to the emergency operator. She didn’t speak again until Kieran woke up, and that was only to scrape out the only question that mattered.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he’d whispered from the hospital bed, not meeting her eye. A hoarse shell of a sound. A husk of himself.

“It’s not your fault.” Slowly, he shook his head. “Don’t think it’s your fault.”

She wanted to scream. What else am I supposed to think?

And then when he’d come back from the ward, they’d gone back to school as though nothing had happened, except that Kieran stopped smiling completely. It was as though now that he’d stopped pretending, all the fight went out of him at once.

Rena fought the decision every step of the way. How was she supposed to watch him? How was anyone supposed to watch him if he was all alone?

But Kieran had been adamant, if passionless. And their parents hadn’t helped. Dad seemed to look at the whole thing as though it were a minor inconvenience he’d rather not think about, and Mum refused to entertain the notion that it had ever happened at all.

“Do you . . .” Sahar trails off. “Do you really think it was up to you to ask?”