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I did. I knew exactly what those words meant. What he was telling me without telling me.

My heart cracked into a thousand pieces.

“You should have let me see him for who he was,” I whispered.

“I just wanted you to be happy,” he said, so quietly I could barely hear it.

I looked at him with wet eyes. We gazed at each other over the center console. So much said without saying anything at all.

“I would have been happier with you.”

41

CHRIS

I woke up at four thirty after more nightmares. Only these weren’t about Mom or about vague scenarios of Larissa getting hurt. These were flashbacks of the real thing from the day before.

Anxiety pulsed through me, jolted me awake. And then I lay there thinking of every horrible, terrible thing. Hitting Mike. Larissa’s lips swelling. The sound of her wheezing.

The words biphasic anaphylaxis kept running through my head. A delayed allergic reaction.

Larissa was in the guest room across the hall. She’d been fine when she went to bed, and I was ten seconds from getting to her if she needed me. I tried to use this fact to ground myself, but it wasn’t enough.

I wanted to be where I could hear her if she started to wheeze again or called out to me and there were two doors between us—too many.

Over the last ten months I’d learned to live with the unbearable urge to be near her when I couldn’t, but the thought of her being in danger overrode my own will. Like an electric charge zinging under my skin telling me to get to where she was, to claw through walls if I had to. The worst-case scenarios pitched around inside me and no matter how tired I was, they wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.

I was not kidding when I said I was traumatized. I was.

I couldn’t begin to process the events of yesterday.

A large part of it didn’t even feel real. Like it was all some strange fever dream and I’d wake up back at the cabin without scabs on my knuckles.

I don’t know why I told her what I did earlier. I think I was just exhausted and done, and my filter was gone. Or maybe I was simply tired of not saying what I wanted to say. Sick of covering for Mike and pretending and lying to her by omission. And Larissa had said that she would have been happier with me. I should have been relieved that the feelings weren’t entirely one-sided, but I wasn’t. Knowing just made it worse.

There was no happy ending for me. Or anyone.

I sat up and turned on the light, trying to shock my system back into reality. Usually after a nightmare, Woofarine helped, but he’d chosen to sleep with her. Larissa hadn’t been taking him lately, and the absence of his weight at the end of the bed felt wrong.

Everything was wrong.

A shift had happened in me yesterday.

I didn’t know if my friendship with Mike would ever come back from this.

I didn’t know if I wanted it to.

I’d never felt before like maybe we’d outgrown each other. Like maybe Mike was someone I wouldn’t have liked today if I hadn’t known him as long as I had. I kept hanging on to who Mike was for me in a previous life, ignoring who he was now, and I was tired of trying to cling to that.

We’re fed the narrative that you never give up on the ones you love. And I did love Mike. But it wasn’t my job to hold him up while he decided if he wanted to stand or not. To scream at him to change until I lost my voice.

I felt done.

Maybe in a few days, once the initial shock of what happened wore off, I’d feel differently, but for now I was angry. And the anger made me want to never see him again.

I hated what I’d done.

I’d never hit anyone before. I was ashamed even thinking about it.