Page 143 of My Unfinished Heart

“Do you wanna know what's not fair, Archer?” he asks, his blue-green eyes blazing. His fury and pain are turned on me so suddenly, I don’t have time to brace myself. “What’s not fair is being a senior in high school and losing both your parents and your baby brother in a single hour. What's not fair is being made to feel unwelcome in the home of the only family you have left. What's not fair is jumping down someone's throat who is young and scared and grieving. Where have you fucking been for him the last four years? Why were you so unwilling to build a relationship with someone who wanted it so bad he would cry himself to sleep at night thinking he must be too ugly, too broken, too gay for his own brother to bother with. That's not fair.”

His words are acid eating through my skin.

Contempt is the worst thing.

Tristan’s contempt is so horrible, it makes me wish I’d been the one in the bathtub. Except I would have cut myself deeper. I would have done it without pills. The pills probably put Connor to sleep before he was able to finish the job. They made him lazy. I wouldn’t have made that mistake.

I get up from the floor, taking a step away from both of them.

Two Saturdays ago, Tristan told me he loved me, and I’d almost believed him.

Almost.

Tonight, in the ICU, the veil lifts. His teenage fantasies are gone, and none of them can pretty me up anymore. There is no love left for me in his eyes. I can tell. I’ve seen this look before.

It was the look on Connor’s face when I told him I was selling our parents’ house. The look on West’s face just after my fist pounded it junior year. The look on Jayne’s face when I told her to move out. You can see it if you look close enough. You can watch someone’s love for you burn out. A candle inside a jar. And then if you wait long enough—if you’re really, really brave—you can watch their eyes grow cold and distant as they cut you out of their life like gangrene, because they know you’ll rot them from the outside in.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, the truth of it—and the shame—swallowing me.

His face changes. The contempt morphs into something more like remorse. “Wait, Archer—” He starts to stand, but I shake my head, holding up my hand to stop him.

I move away from him—away from them both. Away from the sight of someone else’s blood dripping into my brother’s sewn up veins while a machine does the work his lungs won’t do.

Tristan is talking, but all I hear is the sound of my brother’s life translated into beeps and whirs.

The ghosts of his tiny hands press into my face…a whisper from another life.

I’d rather be sick than lonely.

Nothing is real. The halls of the hospital blur like they exist in some other reality. My vision tunnels, blackening around the edges, blinding me enough at times for me to stop walking and pray the walls will hold me up until I can see again.

I go into a bathroom and start throwing up. It comes in convulsive waves. Coffee and bile. It gets so bad that I’m glad I’m in a hospital. Someone will find me eventually. Maybe they can give me something to make it stop. Maybe they’ll make a mistake and kill me.

Right now, I would prefer the latter.

I don’t know how much time I spend puking in the hospital toilet, or whether I fall asleep or pass out with my cheek against the cold tile wall. It’s enough that I’m not throwing up anymore. Best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

What I can share is that the second I begin to move, it starts all over again.

I may not be dying, but I am not okay.

So at three-ten a.m. on a Saturday in August, from the floor of a bathroom stall at St. David's hospital during one of the ten-second stretches I get between throwing up and gulping for air, I text West.

I pass out again before he finds me. When I wake, it’s because his hand is on my shoulder, shaking me.

“Jesus, brother, could you have been any more fucking vague about where you were? I've been in and out of twenty bathrooms between here and the parking lot.”

He’s kneeling down next to me, putting his hand on my clammy forehead.

“Did you take something?” he asks.

I make a weak attempt at shaking my head, closing my eyes again.

But when I close them…fuck.

I see Tristan. Tristan bent over my pale and bloody brother on another bathroom floor. The image has me over the rim of the toilet bowl again in a second flat.

West rubs my back until I slump against him. “You okay?” he asks, one hand in the middle of my chest and the other arm around me. He’s keeping me upright. The way he always has.