People stared as I pushed past them, but I kept my head up and kept walking. He had fallen apart in front of everyone, making them all witnesses to my execution. My heart felt like a fresh crime scene: the victim already bagged and tagged, ready to be carted away.Draw the white chalk,I thought bitterly as I hit the hospital exit,and just be done with it.
thirty-six
VANESSA-EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
They always saidlife wasn’t fair, and yeah—I got it. Still, I hated that saying. It read like a verdict, a declaration that life would never be fair, so you might as well just accept it. On that day, though, the saying felt heartbreakingly true. Los Angeles was gray and soggy, as if even the sky were crying.
Catherine and Christopher were gone. Even thinking it made something inside me want to laugh because it felt entirely absurd. They should have been there. So many awful peoplecould have been taken instead—criminals, assholes—but two of the kindest, most talented people were just gone. The world made no sense.
Calling the funeral “hard” was a massive understatement. I had never seen so much black, so many tears, so much collective grief. I usually liked the color black, but on that day, I hated it. I hated what it stood for. I wanted to call its agent and get the color fired. I wanted it banished from every fabric on earth.
Afterward, I sat with Morgan in her bedroom, my fingers threading through her hair while she cried until there was nothing left. When she finally stopped, it was only because her tear ducts had run completely dry. She was entirely spent—mentally, physically, emotionally—before she finally passed out.
I gently moved Morgan’s head from my lap onto a pillow so I could use the bathroom. My bladder was about to burst; I had held it for hours because I hadn’t wanted to disturb the tiny pocket of peace she had finally found. Since the accident, she hadn't slept at all. Now, at last, her body had given up and allowed her to rest.
When I walked back down the hall, I glanced at the door across from Morgan’s—Elliott’s room. I hadn’t seen him cry once. Maybe he had gotten it out already. Morgan said he had shut down completely, and I understood that—brains protect themselves in weird ways when the trauma is too heavy.
Against my better judgment, I rapped lightly on his door. When no one answered, I turned the knob and pushed it open. He was there, still wearing his black funeral suit, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar and his tie hanging loose around his neck. I had never truly understood the phrasedevastatingly beautifuluntil that exact moment. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes held an absolute, consuming darkness. Like Morgan, he clearly hadn’t slept. I would have given anything—my soul, my heart—to see a single spark of life return to those eyes.
“I just wanted to check if you needed anything,” I offered, my voice feeling incredibly clumsy in the quiet room.
He needed his parents. There was nothing I or anyone else could do to bring them back. He was only twenty years old; his parents would never see him graduate, get married, or have kids of his own. It wasn’t fair. It made no goddamn sense.
He didn’t answer me. He just kept staring blankly at the wall. I turned to leave, but something stopped me before I could step away. For no good reason, I walked over and sat beside him on the edge of the mattress. I reached out, took his hand, and just held it. It was the only thing I could think to do—to sit with him in the suffocating sadness and offer whatever quiet comfort I could give.
He shot up off the bed instantly, as if my touch had shocked his entire system. “I need you to leave.”
The words hit me like a physical slap to the face.
“I was just?—”
“I don’t care. I need you to leave. I want to be alone. This”—he gestured sharply between the two of us—“I don’t want this. I want you to go.” His voice was urgent, tight, and deadly serious.
Even as I backed away toward the door, he kept pushing, his panic mounting. “I need you to go as far away as possible. I don’t want you in our house. I don’t want to see you. Just leave.” His voice started to climb, almost as if he were pleading with himself as much as he was with me.
He sounded completely tortured when his voice dropped, whispering, “Please. Please, just leave. I don’t want to see you. I don’t need you here. Please.”
The lastpleasewas strangled in a way I had never heard from him before.
I closed his door behind me and walked out to my car on absolute auto-pilot. I replayed the brutal exchange a dozen times in my head before my hand even touched the driver's side doorhandle. What did I do wrong? I had only tried to be there for him.
When I finally pulled out of the driveway and let myself start to cry, my phone began to ring. I thought this was easily the worst night of my life—but I had no idea what else the darkness of this night still held.
thirty-seven
VANESSA
He wanted space,so to be a smart-ass I gave him all the space he could handle: almost one thousand miles of it. I called Richard and finally got to speak to Morgan myself. As soon as I knew that she and the baby were going to be okay, I booked my flight home. I flew back to Los Angeles that very night.
My sister met me at the airport and helped me clear all my things out of Elliott’s house. Within twenty-four hours of him telling me he didn’t need me, I scrubbed every remaining traceof him off my body and out of my life. If Steve had been there, he would have found himself conveniently relocated, too.
I stayed up until dawn drafting a five-year plan, because at that moment, outlining an aggressive future felt like the only sensible thing to do. It didn’t include Elliott—or any other man. I was completely done. Maybe this was the universe finally telling me to be alone and focus entirely on myself.
A week later, he started calling, texting, and showing up at my mom’s house. Luckily, I had already given Mom strict instructions: no visitors under any circumstances. She asked me over and over what had happened, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her the whole truth. He still hung the cloud-and-moon for her, and I didn’t want to be the one to rip that down. I told her simply that whatever he did was bad enough that I never wanted to see him again, and God bless her, she listened.
I finally broke down and told my sister one night during one of those exhausting, all-night talks. I vented fourteen years’ worth of buried frustration and felt pounds lighter the second it was out. She didn’t offer unsolicited advice; she just listened.
When we were finally spent, staring up at the dark bedroom ceiling, she reached over, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “There’s this beautiful place about a half hour outside the city—just a big, empty field. I think animals used to graze there. It would make a beautiful final resting place.”
