“Tell me,” she said.
So I told her. All of it.
Hannah listened without interrupting. She was good at that. She had always been good at that.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment, looking out at the yard where our mother’s garden had gone brown and dry at the edges. Then she said, “Why didn’t you tell her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I looked at my hands. She was right. I did know. I had known for weeks and had not wanted to say it out loud because saying it out loud would make it real, and making it real meant doing something about it. “Part of it was fear that I’d drive her away. But I was also afraid she’d think I was staying for her,” I said. “That she’d feel—obligated to be with me. Or pressured. I had made a decision about my whole life and built it around her before she had any say in it. And I liked how I felt when I was with her and didn’t want anything to change. It’s peaceful withher. I’ve never felt that way before. I liked how things were going without the pressure.”
“So you hid it.”
“I didn’t hide it. I just—didn’t say it.”
Hannah gave me the look she had been giving me since we were children. “Jasper.”
“I know.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“I know.” I leaned back on my hands and looked up at the pale sky through the branches. A crow moved through the far end of the yard and disappeared into the trees. “I’ve been doing it my whole life. Deciding what people can handle before I give them the chance to handle it. Handling things alone because it’s easier, and then I won’t be a burden.” I paused. “I know it’s not really easier. I just don’t know how to stop doing it.”
Hannah was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “She loves you.”
“I know.”
“And you love her.”
“Yeah. More than anything.”
“Then go tell her that. Not tomorrow. Not when you’ve figured out exactly the right thing to say.” She looked at me sideways. “You’re not going to figure out exactly the right thing to say. That’s not how this works. You go, and you tell her the truth—the real truth, the one you just told me—and you let her decide what to do with it. That’s all you can do.”
I looked at her. My sister, who had been on the other end of every hard phone call, who had waited for me on this porch through every hard time in my life, who had been patient with me in ways I had not always deserved. “When did you get so good at this?”
She smiled, but it had something complicated in it that came and went too fast for me to read. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
I sat on the porch for a while longer after that, letting the afternoon light come in low through the trees, and the cold settle into my jacket, and the quiet of my parents’ yard settle into my bones. I thought about Cara’s face across the table from mine when things were easy between us—the ease I had not known I was capable of until I had found it with her, I had not been easy to know. I had kept most of myself in reserve for most of my life, had offered people the parts of me that were manageable and held the rest back, had convinced myself that this was consideration when it was something closer to fear.
Cara had not asked me to be different. She had just—waited. Quietly and without pressure, she’d left the door open and stood far enough back that I could choose to walk through it. And I had walked through it. And then I had kept a huge decision from her that I had no good reason to keep, and I had let it go on too long, and I had hurt her with it. Not because I wanted to hurt her. Because I was still, after everything, better at handling things alone than I was at sharing the burden.
I needed to be better than that. Iwantedto be better than that. For her, yes—but also for myself, for the version of myself I was trying to build, the version that stayed and said the true things and did not make the people he loved try to figure out his silences.
I stood up. Hannah looked up at me.
“Go,” she said. “You have things to do.”
I went.
Chapter 32
Jasper
Ididn’t go home.
Instead, I turned toward town. I had only been to Emmett’s office twice before, both times just to drop something off, and I had never planned on coming today. But I had been taking my time with this decision. I made it in my kitchen this morning and confirmed it at my mother’s table an hour ago. I wasn’t about to drive past his turn and head back to an empty cabin, where I would sit alone with it for another night.
