“But you’re still blaming yourself for what happened,” my mom said. “And I think you’ve carried that into your relationship with Luca. You can’t save him, sweetheart.”
I felt my defenses rising. “I wasn’t trying tosaveLuca.” Even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. I’d wanted to prevent him from ever feeling the way my brother did, and I’d failed.
Kia kept her tone calm and steady. “I think you were. And you thought if you could save him, you could somehow save part of Brennan too.”
“That’s not true,” I protested, but the words came out weak, even to my own ears.
“McKenzie, you can’t save other people. The only person you can ever save is yourself,” Kia continued. “And as your friend, I’m telling you that you need to seek help or you’re going to end up in a dark place. I know because I’ve been right where you’re sitting.”
I lifted my watery eyes up to hers.
“How do you think I recognized you were having a panic attack?” she asked with a sad smile. “Because I’ve had them myself. I think the milestone anniversary of your brother’s death last year unearthed a lot of stuff for you. Mine started on my fortieth birthday. I felt like I was moving into a new stage of life, and I guess my brain finally caught up and realized my husband wasn’t coming with me—that we weren’t gonna grow old together. It was a tough pill to swallow.” She took a deep breath and cleared her throat. “The grief I felt was so all-encompassing I thought it would drown me. And it might’ve if I hadn’t gone back into therapy.”
“I started back recently too,” my mom confessed.
I shifted my focus to her. “What? When?”
“After the New Year,” she answered. “Having Luca around…He reminds me a lot of Brennan and the man I think he might’ve become. And that’s a beautiful thing. But it’s also a hard thing.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because the last thing I wanted was for you to feel like you needed to save me too,” she said. “Kia’s right. You need to take care of yourself. And if you really want your relationship with Luca to work, you’re going to have to prioritize your own mental health. It’s like when you’re on a plane, and they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask first in the event of a crash. You can’t help someone else when you’re gasping for air.”
“I’m just so worried about him,” I choked out.
“We know you are,” my mom said. “And nobody is saying you shouldn’t talk to him. But right now, you need to let some of the other people in his circle step in.”
“And let us take care of you,” Kia added.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell them nobody could help him the way I could, but I had no fight left in me. My body was weak, my brain foggy and exhausted.
“Okay,” I agreed. But no matter what Kia or my mother told me, all I really wanted to do was to save him. To saveus.
If there was an us left to save.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Luca
When McKenzie disconnected our call,the last thread tying me to the earth snapped. I started to call someone else—maybe Dallas or Cash—but I didn’t deserve their words of comfort. I wasn’t worthy of the excuses they’d inevitably make to help me feel better about the person I was. The piece of shit I knew I’d always be at my core. There was no righting the amount of wrongs I’d caused in my life. It was best for everyone if I just disappeared quietly into the night.
The walls of the hobbit house were closing in on me, squeezing the air from my lungs. I packed what shit I had there, which wasn’t much more than some clothes and my guitar. The squirrel McKenzie had given to me was the last thing I grabbed, but in the end, I left him along with my key. The last thing I needed was another reminder of the ways I’d failed the woman I loved.
I turned the lock and shut the door, leaving behind every hope and counterfeit dream that place had held. But even as I walked away, that suffocating feeling followed me into the car. My old demon friends had returned…or maybe they’d never left. Either way, they were unwilling to let me cast them aside.
There wasn’t a lot of traffic on my drive back to Kentucky, but my mind was filled with noise. An endless assault of thoughts and questions shot through my brain, hitting me with punch after punch.
Why did I ever think I could amount to anything more than a fuckup? I wasn’t a changed man. I hadn’t healed. All I’d managed to do was slap bandages over gaping wounds. Except I wasn’t the one being injured. I was the cause of the damage, and the longer I stuck around, the more I risked those I loved bleeding out.
It started with canceling me, but the aftermath would be felt by McKenzie, Laurel, Grace, and anyone else connected to me. Because people would wonder why they stood by me. I couldn’t ask them to stake their reputations on mine. Iwouldn’t. But more than that, I didn’t want to stick around long enough for them to begin to question why they were still putting up with me. At least if I left on my own, I could still maintain some illusion of control instead of the devastation I’d feel if—when—they finally had enough and walked away.
I’d been looking at my musical comeback as a second chance, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’d squandered hundreds of chances and spit on every opportunity I’d been handed for years. Having everything I could have hoped for dangled in front of me, only to have it slip through my fingers, felt like a penance for every ounce of potential I’d thrown away. It was nowhere near the punishment I deserved, but it was a start.
Even though music blared through the speakers, the monsters had taken control of the playlist inside my mind, blasting McKenzie’s words on a loop. No matter how loud I turned up the volume on the radio, I couldn’t drown them out.
I won’t be there to hold your hand through everything.
She was right, of course. I’d been so wrapped up in the prospect of a tour, of having my own music career, that I hadn't stopped to consider what that meant forus.What would happen if I went on the road or if one album became two or three or five? I’d assumed she’d be there beside me. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of hernotbeing there because what kind of relationship would that have been? Dozens of missed phone calls andsorry-I-missed-you’s.Birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays celebrated apart. More time spent away from each other than together. I’d been too caught up in my own selfish desires to ask what she wanted. And she deserved more than that. She deserved more thanme.
