Page 152 of My Unfinished Heart

He rests his head on my chest like it’s the heaviest weight, and I run my hand over his short hair. “Babysitting crisis?” he asks.

“Right. West has this girlfriend with two little girls. I’ve gotten…involved.”

“That’s really cute,” he says.

“It’s something to do.” Other than hate myself and curse my inability to turn back time.

“You’re not still working?”

“No, I am, but I took a lighter class load this semester.”

“Because of what happened?” he asks.

I sigh. “I guess.” I’m not sure how much I want to heap on Connor in terms of the ways I’m suffering. Deep down, I know I’ll survive it, even if some days suck much worse than others. “But it’s been good. The girls are sweet. They’re fun.” Life-affirming is the word I want to use, but talk of life and death feels like another bad idea.

“Can I meet them?” he asks.

“If you want. They’d like you.”

“How do you figure?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. Connor’s mysterious, though, and Eliza, especially, loves a mystery.

We’re quiet for a few minutes, where I keep rubbing his head, and he keeps his ear pressed to my heart. It’s comfortable in that homecoming way. In that way it was when he fit himself to me in the fever dream of flu and soft violet watercolor paint. “Do you want to talk without the therapist?” I finally ask.

He doesn’t say yes or no. He just starts talking. I don’t even have time to prepare myself.

“I have this tendency to make excuses for her. Like she must have been really incredibly unhappy or hurt to do the things she did.”

I’m glad I let my own therapist talk me into taking anxiety medicine. A smooth calm filters through me just in time. It isn’t natural, but it’s good enough. It puts a damper on the dread. And when I say dread, I mean⁠—

DREAD.

“But he says I can’t always let myself do that. He says it’s helpful in terms of moving on, but that I need to process through my own feelings about it first. I don’t know if you had this same experience or something like it, but for me, she was like an emotional vampire. Like stirring up emotions—and it didn’t matter whether they were good or bad—only to make herself feel something. She wanted the bad ones more, I think. But sometimes to get to the really bad ones, she had to create good ones first.”

I can’t look at him. I don’t want to hear any of this. My therapist and I have barely scratched the surface of my family history, and this is like getting shoved into the deep end. What he’s saying reminds me of that relieved plunge into sleep and then a pillow over my face. Her laughter when I’d struggle and push her away. The evil I felt radiating off her when the blanket burned, and I stared at it, and she stared at me, waiting for me to cry. Or to go into the fire after it.

Because I’m still unwilling to tell him what happened to me, I don’t have any right to ask him for details. I just say, “I know what you mean.”

He goes on. “I went back and forth a lot growing up—over whether I loved you or hated you. Whether I missed you or whether I wished you’d stay gone. She told me you wanted nothing to do with me. And then, once she was done scaring the shit out of me about you, she liked to tell me about how talented you were. How tall and strong and handsome. And what the hell would you want with a scrawny little limp-wrist like me. And I think you and I both know limp-wrist wasn’t the word she always used.”

I shift, needing him off me so I can look at him. “That wasn’t a thing for me. That was never a thing I thought.”

“I know that now, but I didn’t when you came home. When you saw me all helpless and broken in the hospital. When you met Tristan. I figured you’d probably know immediately he was gay and I was gay, and I didn’t want you to think that made me weak.”

“You survived,” I remind him. “And anyway, I knew you were probably gay way before that.”

“Yeah?”

I nod.

“And?” he asks. “Is that why you stayed away?”

I scoff at that. “Of course not.”

“Then why did you?”

“They kept me away from you.”