Page 238 of Immune

“I know that, too.”

“Then why are you still here?” she asks.

“Because you haven’t told me to leave,” I tell her softly.

Her expression stutters then. She goes from annoyance to something smaller and much more dangerous.

“You always do that,” she mutters.

“What?”

“Make things sound simple when they’re not.”

I lean back against the locked door. I’m not blocking it, though. If she wants to leave, I’ll step aside and let her before she even reaches me. “They can be complicated and still have a simple answer.”

Dakota laughs once, but it’s not a pretty sound. Good. Ugly is far more honest.

“My brother is alive,” she says.

“He is.”

“He came back.”

“Yes.”

“Except he didn’t come back.”

I hold her gaze as I say, “No.”

The word drops between us heavily and she waits for more. I give her nothing more than that, and her jaw tightens. “That’s it?”

“That’s just what you said,” I tell her gently.

“You’re not going to try to explain to me how he tried? How he had his reasons? How the world was complicated? How he was only trying to save me?” she pushes.

I shake my head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you already know those things,” I explain, keeping my voice even and calm and soft.

Her eyes sharpen. “And?”

“And they don’t make it hurt any less.”

Silence spreads through the greenhouse. A drop of water falls from a leaf into the soil below, and Dakota’s hand tightens around the hat still tightly gripped between her fingers.

“I wanted to hit him again,” she confesses.

“I know.”

“I wanted to crawl right into his chest and never leave.”

“I know.”

“I wanted him to say something that made all the years and pain and suffering worth it,” she rasps, her voice breaking on the word worth, but only for a split second. She hates it immediately, and I see that hatred move through her face quicker than shame can even catch it.

“There are no words like that,” I tell her.