And when I found her—curled up on the bed, her hand still clutching her phone, crying so hard she didn’t even notice me—I just sat beside her. I pulled her into my arms, and she started mumbling things.
As if she were talking to herself.
Or to me.
But not really aware that I was even there.
Sloane was crying in my arms for hours. She couldn’t stop, and I didn’t know how to help her.
Through her tears, she kept mumbling about Xander, her brother, who, from what I knew, died in a car accident. But she was telling me things I hadn’t heard before—pieces of a story that didn’t fit the version I thought I knew.
I tried to make sense of it all, gathering what I could from her broken words.
She spoke about the pressure they both grew up under, how they never really got to be kids. No carefree teenage years. No space to breathe. Just the constant weight of expectations, all laid on them by their father.
She told me about the beatings, how their father took it out on Xander more than anyone knew. About how it broke him down slowly until there was nothing left to hold on to. He took pills to end his life. By the time she drove him to the hospital, he was already slipping away.
And then—the accident.
When the police and EMTs found her, she was badly bleeding, sitting in the back seat, and holding a lifeless Xander in her arms. His body was still, untouched by the crash—no fresh blood or bruises, only the cold stillness of death. She stared ahead with a vacant gaze, numb and frozen in shock.
Sloane stayed like that for days.
And her twisted parents didn’t do a thing. They showed up only when she was admitted and again when it was time to take her home. The days in between, when she was lost inside herself and barely holding on, she spent completely alone. And worst of all, she never even got the chance to go to Xander’s burial. One more wound left open.
She said she was the one behind the wheel. The crash didn’t kill Xander—he was already gone before it happened. But maybe her decision did.
Because she didn’t wait. She panicked. She tried to save him herself.
The emergency team arrived just after she left. They traced the address through the landline she’d used, and it was registered to the house. Due to a roadblock, they arrived fourteen minutes later, exactly three minutes after she drove away.
“They might’ve saved him,” she whispered. “If I had just waited... they might have saved him.”
I held her tighter. I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing that could undo it. Nothing that could make it right.
All I could do was stay.
And then she told me the last thing he said to her.
He told her helovedher.
I felt the tremors run through her as she said it, how hard it was for her to force the words out, maybe because it brought her back to that moment, to Xander dying in her arms.
My mind went back to the times she’d said those words to me. All four times, spread across the years. It must have hurt so much each time she said it.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head and closed my eyes, feeling the burn of tears behind my lids.
She still said it to me, even though it tore her apart. Those rare words were monumental for her, and now, knowing the cost, they fill me with crippling guilt.
“I begged him to stay, Cam. I did. I begged him not to leave me.”
And I had left her, too.
I couldn’t begin to imagine what she must have felt.
That guilt settled heavily in my chest, choking the air from my lungs.
She sobbed so hard her words barely came through.
