Page 96 of Gravity

“What is he doing out there?” She turns quickly, tears now falling. “What is he doing?”

“Nora.”

“What is he doing, Grayson? What is so important that he can’t come back?”

“Drinking,” I admit. “He’s out there drinking.”

She gasps, her voice now higher as her body begins to shake with her distress. “But he should be here. He should be with us. With me. Why is he there when he should be with us? Pop was his dad, too!”

I’m up on my feet, and in seconds I’m wrapping my arms around her as she weeps against my chest. I hope he wallows in more guilt the second he’s home. I hope he sees in his sister what I’ve witness this past week, the pain she is suffering, and the cries I hear when she thinks no one is listening. I hope he feels it all because the selfish prick deserves it. Then I feel like a total asshole because being vindictive is not pretty, it’s shameful because while Nora is here in agony, Asher is clearly out there suffering, too. Although, that still doesn’t make this right.

“He took the cowards way out, Nora. That’s why he left. He didn’t want to be here.”

Her body stills, and I regret my words instantly. Looking up at me with devastation in her eyes, she frowns. My heart thumps hard as a ball of emotion that is wedged in the back of my throat begins to hurt with the pressure.

“What do you mean, he didn’t want to be here?”

Swallowing hard, I let the words fall, despising myself for letting it get this far. “Asher never needed to head out to Cali. He could have stayed here, but he went out because he…”

“Because, what?”

I look at her, disliking the fact I’m about to crush her and she can read from my eyes that I’m about to.

“Grayson, because what?”

“Because he couldn’t cope with watching your dad get sicker with his seizures.”

She gasps, her eyes searching mine frantically as shock covers her features, stepping back abruptly. The void I now feel is excruciating as her tiny frame looks so vulnerable before me as if I’ve stripped her of every feeling you can possibly imagine and replaced them with ice-cold water and devastation. Her face is pale as her arms hug her waistline.

I swallow hard, knowing I’ve made her this way, but the agony I feel only gets worse when her eyes widen with understanding. It’s right there that my words have finally sunk in, and the wreckage of what I’ve just said has now wrapped around her heart like razor-sharp wire squeezing the life from it.

“You knew?” she whispers. “You’ve known all this time and you never thought to tell me?”

“I can explain.”

“Oh my God.” Her body shakes violently, and I step toward her needing to hold her because she’s not the only one who’s feeling fragile right now. I am, too. Despite my hidden truths, despite what I promised Asher when I know I shouldn’t have, I’m also struggling with all of this myself. But she holds her hand up abruptly, stopping me from getting any closer.

“So, not only did you not say anything once he’d gone, but you wait almost a week after Dad died to tell me when you’ve heard me ask of him, when you’ve listened to me cry at night. You’ve done all of that and never said a word.”

"You have to know I was never happy about keeping you in the dark."

"But you went along with it anyway." She wipes her cheeks, the agony in her body cutting me in two. “Why, Grayson? You knew how worried I was when Dad came home. You knew how much I struggled seeing him in hospital, and you knew how hard I fought each day to keep a smile on my face when I wanted to curl up and cry because I was worried about losing him. Why would you do that to me?”

“Nora, listen to me—”

“Tell me!” she screams. “Why would you keep information from me when you knew it would change everything?"

"Because of that very reason!” I step closer, my chest now on the brink of exploding as my own emotions crawl up my body waiting to expose themselves as I confess everything. "I wanted to tell you—believe me I wanted to—but then I watched you with your dad and all those things you said about wanting to keep the memory alive came back. How you recreated what you used to do to make him smile and how by doing it, it made you forget what the future might hold. I held that information back from you, Nora, because I couldn’t sit and watch that be destroyed by you knowing your brother had left you on your own at a time when you needed him.”

“All those times I put on a brave face in front of Dad when I was worried. All those times you watched us together. Those nights I stayed at yours. The ones when you took me away from him. Did you not think to tell me that I was doing it on my own?”

My blood runs cold. “What… what do you mean took you away from him? Nora, I never took you away from him. This is not my fault.”

Silence falls between us, and for a moment, I can’t read her. She just stands at the opposite side of the tree house, staring me down like a deer in head lights, her body still trembling as her tears fall heavy, but her words that come next hit me with so much impact that it takes my breath away.

“That night he died, I never got to say goodbye because I was with you... when I should have been with him!"

Like I’ve received a bullet to the heart, I step back from her verbal blow. I can’t breathe, my own frame now beginning to tremble as tears that have been threatening to leave my body now start to fall.