AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You know what happened wasn’t your fault, right?”
“It is.” I wiped at my face. “I was supposed to be watching him, and… You didn’t see. There was so—” I hiccupped “—there was so much blood.”
“Oh, Kenny.” Taylor pulled me to her, hugging me. “It was an accident. Kids fall over all the time, especially Finn. That’s what you told me, right? That he’s so accident-prone.”
“Yeah, but…” I inhaled deeply to try to contain my sniffles and stutters. “Not like that. You don’t understand what it feels like to see someone you love like that.”
She held me at arm’s length, her thin eyebrow arched high. “Don’t I? I wouldn’t know what it’s like to see someone I love on the floor, covered in blood, thinking they’re dead.” She let go of me and brought both of her legs up onto the couch, crossing them, and folded her arms over her chest, finishing with a sarcastic, “No. I wouldn’t knowanythingabout that.”
I didn’t have much memory of the night of my first seizure, and although I knew what my sister had done for me then, what she still did for me now, sometimes it was easy to forget that she was the one to find me. She was the one who called the ambulance, who cleaned the blood up off the kitchen floor, and held my hand in the hospital.
Taylor was my overbearing sister, the one who told me what to do and gave me advice even when I didn’t want or ask for it.
But she was also the one who took care of me, who I knew loved me more than life itself.
Exactly how I felt about Finn.
My sister blinked a few times, like she might start to cry, but Taylor Novak didn’t cry. Ever.
“It was horrible,” she said eventually. “The worst thing I’d ever seen and probably will ever see. Sometimes…” She stared at me like she was unsure if she wanted to go on. “I don’t think a lot about Dad or how he looked at the end. I don’t have nightmares about that, but I do have them about you. That night haunts me.” She lifted one shoulder. “I suspect it will forever, so, yes, I knowexactlywhat it feels like. Helpless and hopeless and like you can’t breathe. Guilty and ashamed and like you would give anything to take it away or rewind.”
I nodded. “I keep hearing his screams, and I…”
When I covered my face as I cried, Taylor pulled me to her once again, this time rocking me like I was a child. “It’s not your fault. It only feels like it is because you love him and you’re responsible for him. I suspect when he loses his first tooth or gets in his first argument with a friend, you might also find a way to think it’s somehow your fault.”
That tugged a reluctant smile out of me. “No. I’m not you.”
“No.” Taylor smoothed my hair away from my face. “You’re not. You love so easily. You see the best in everyone, even when they don’t deserve it, so I don’t understand why you don’t thinkyoudeserve the same.”
I swiped my sleeve over my cheeks. “You told me not to fall in love with him.”
She wagged her head side to side with a pinched brow. “Notallof my advice is good.”
“I heard that!” Dean called from the kitchen.
“Shut up, you!”
I sniffled a laugh, but my good humor quickly faded. “Liam hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“Yes, he does. You didn’t see his face.”
“Kennedy,” Taylor said with a roll of her eyes, “not everything is about you.”
I socked her in the arm, and she laughed.
“He was devastated,” I said, and she dropped her chin, likeYeah…?
“Of course he was devastated. He had to hold his kid down while somebody put metal into his head. Who wouldn’t be devastated?”
“And it was my?—”
“I swear to god, if I hear you say it was your fault one more time, I will burn all of your makeup.”
I wrenched my head back. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
