“I’m sorry about your house,” he says. We exchanged a few messages in the lead-up to my visit, so he knows about the fire and my new living situation. “What happened?”
I take a sip and recall the events of the fire. Silas stares into his drink as I speak, the mug encased between his large hands.
“I’m sorry,” he says when I finish, and his gaze flickers to mine.
“Me too.” I clutch the charm on my necklace. “Still feels strange not living there.”
“How’s living with Anna?”
A smile tugs at my lips. “She wants to party all the time, and she’s really hard to say no to. But it’s good.” I hesitate. “Her friends are nice, too. How’s work?”
His mouth pulls to the side, landing somewhere between a smile and a grimace. “Awful.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” He gives me a small smile, but the tension doesn’t leave his eyes. “In your voicemail, you said you needed something?”
That’s Silas, always straight to the point.I take another sip of coffee and release a breath. “I’m trying to find a copy of my mother’s death certificate.”
Silas’s dark brows furrow, his eyes abruptly lifting to mine. “Why?”
He already knows everything about me, so there’s no point in lying. “I found one of her old journals after the fire and the entry dates don’t line up. There’s no public record of her death, and the hospital lost her chart. But then I thought—the police have access to those sorts of records, don’t they?”
A look of pity crosses his face. “Mariella, your mother killed herself,” he says softly.
My fingers tighten around my mug. “But what if she didn’t? What if she wasn’t mentally ill? I need to know, before I waste my whole life trying to diagnose her.”
“Waste?” he says, tilting his head. “Becoming a psychologist is your dream.”
Itwasmy dream, back when I didn’t think I had a choice. Before I got a taste of what life might be like without the weight of my mother’s disease hanging over my shoulders. Before I knew about time travel and Neurovida.
Before I knew about Parker.
“I don’t think it is anymore,” I whisper into the dregs of coffee at the bottom of my mug. I feel Silas’s gaze like a cool chill on a winter’s night, and I glance up at him. He’s sitting impossibly still, his expression unreadable. A closed book since the day we met.
“Since when?” he asks, his voice taut.
I bite my lip and lower my hands into my lap, curling the sleeve of my sweater around my fingers.
Silas leans forward, the table creaking under the weight of his tense arms. “You’re making a mistake. Don’t throw all your hard work away on a whim.”
I sit up and place my hands on the coarse surface of the table. “Like you threw me away?”
He leans back in his chair, dark brows raised as he scans the forest outside his living room.
“Why did you do it?” The words slip out before I can stop them, small and fragile.
“Mariella,” he warns.
“Please, Silas. I need to hear it.”
He exhales through his nose, frowning at his large fists, white-knuckled on the table. “I told you. I was holding you back,” he says, his deep voice laced with regret. “You’d turn down invites from Anna and come here instead. And even when I was away, you’d only leave the house to go to classor work. And look at you now.” He gestures across the table. “Living on campus. Going out. Making friends. The way it should be. Iknewwithout me you’d have a better life.”
His throat moves in a forced swallow, his gaze averted to the rough grains in the tabletop. “You’re lying,” I say. “You pushed me away, and the least you can do is tell me why, Silas. You owe me that. Why wouldn’t you let me in? Why wasn’t I enough?”
He slams his fist down on the table with such force my mug rattles. “Because you’re achild. You’re eighteen and I’m—We’re in different stages of our lives. When we met, I took pity on you, Mariella.” His voice breaks and he clenches his jaw. “You needed help and I gave it to you. But like I said, you don’t need me anymore. You haven’t for a long time. You need to move on with your life.”
I get to my feet, tears sliding down my cheeks. “I wish I’d never met you,” I whisper. The words don’t seem to surprise him; the crease in his brow only deepens. “I feel sorry for you. I think you want to be alone and miserable. I think you’re punishing yourself for some messed-up reason, and you justify your actions as noble and selfless. But the reality is you led me on, Silas.”
