Page 140 of All the way home

“Do you have any idea how fast someone can pull the rug out from under you?” Kieran asks. There’s an unpleasant, grim set to his jaw. “Do you have any clue how well someone can hide what they really think, until it matters?”

She lurches back, blinking.

Kieran leaps to his feet. For a hurtling moment, Rena thinks he’s going to run away again. That he’s done.

But he just starts to pace.

Helplessly, she watches.

“Second-to-last night of our trip,” Kieran starts, voice thick with emotion, “after things had been going so well I thought—I felt like I hadn’t—”

Rena’s heart trips and lurches with dread.

Kieran drops his face into his hands. “He found out one of his friends had been committed. Someone he’d known practically from birth, and then suddenly she was a ‘psycho.’ Suddenly she was this other subset of person that he talked about—like he was disgusted with her for being weak.”

Rena covers her mouth with her hand.

“And I thought, what the fuck am I going to do if he finds out about me? I mean, I was just starting to make progress and get better, and it was just—I didn’t know what to do. It was like I saw him differently overnight. I wasn’t—I wasn’t bored. I was crushed.”

Rena stands.

Kieran lets his hands fall and blinks up at her.

“I’m sorry.” Rena steps forward and wraps her arms around him, hooking her chin against his shoulder.

With a startled little noise, he says, “Rena, you don’t ha—”

She squeezes tighter.

He falls silent, so she knows the message has been received, and wraps his arms around her and lets his head fall forward. “Tell me if it’s too much.”

Something enormous is stretching out from under her skin and carving a hole in her chest, a feeling that’s Kieran-specific and borderline unbearable.

“Did you seriously think I was just pretending with Josiah?”

“Well, apparently, you’re a fucking excellent liar, Kieran,” Rena spits, and realizes, as hot tears burn, that she’s found the source of the wound. “Why didn’t—why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

“Well, it was fucking humiliating, wasn’t it?”

He has more to say, and Rena knows it, so she stays quiet and rests her face on his shoulder.

Sure enough, after a moment, voice very small, almost broken, he murmurs, “I guess I didn’t want you to side with him. Or . . . if you did, I didn’t want to know.”

Rena bursts into tears.

“Oh shit.” Kieran turns his face in, a hand coming to rest on her back. “Rena?”

Through heaving sobs, face in his shoulder, she asks, “Why would I side with him on that?”

“I don’t—I was afraid you would,” Kieran whispers.

“You wouldn’t tell me anything after, you didn’t—I thought you hated me,” she gasps, leaning on him. “I thought it was my fault, and—and it was, wasn’t it?”

“What?” Aghast, Kieran pulls back, hands on her shoulders.

“I must’ve done—I should have seen it,” she says, burying her face in her hands. “I should have known.”

A strangled whisper, he says, “Rena, I—”