Page 176 of These Secret Years

“No.”

Which isn’t to say I don’t know what he means. These years—this past one specifically—did everything in its power to break us. And he’s right about something else, too. We wound up even further apart than where we started, and he no longer needs whatever he thought I had to offer in the beginning. Love is such a stupid, useless emotion. It heals nothing. It changes nothing.

Because here is this person I love more than anything—who I would do anything to make happy. To keep safe. To have and hold and yes, to fuck, but he’s saying he’s done.

“A break? Is that what this is?”

He sniffs and doesn’t respond because he and I both know he’s asking for more than a break. He told me it wasn’t working. That we’re too different. That our lives don’t line up anymore.

“You should go,” he says softly.

“Is that really what you want?”

He nods, and the one consolation I take from that gesture is how devastated he looks. I probably look exactly the same. Maybe he didn’t plan this. Maybe it just happened. Maybe it’s been happening, and I’ve been too wrapped up in my own shit to notice that he wasn’t just reacting or recoiling. He was actually pulling away.

I pick up my bag, and he steps away from the bedroom door to let me pass through it.

Maybe we’re further apart in terms of where our lives are headed, but I have never been as close to anyone as I am with him. No one knows me the way he does. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give myself to someone as completely as I was able to with him. And maybe that’s why everyone’s always going on so much about their first loves.

It’s a cut that never heals because all it can do is bleed.

Somehow, and I genuinely do not know how, but I manage to keep it together through a fourteen hour drive home because of course there were no other flights available this week, and this became painfully obvious when the woman on the phone for one of the airlines laughed when I asked about changing my ticket.

It’s not until I get home and am tucked safely in my room that I double over from the pain of it all. In the car, I was sort of keeping things in perspective. I’ve got a big life—a whole new world in front of me, and I can do whatever I want, whatever I need. I’m “free.”

But as I’m bent over crying in my bedroom, I remember what “freedom” looked like for Sullivan. Locked in his own head, unable to outrun the memories because they were caged in there, too, and where did I fit into all that? Had I made it worse? Had I made him feel more broken than he is because I refused to “help” him?

Over the summer, my mother told me I had a gentle soul. She said it reminded her of my father. The NFL and fame had forced him to don a tough exterior, but behind all that was the man we’d all loved so much, who loved us back so much it still hurts to think about.

But I let myself think about it now, and what he might say if he could see my heartbreak up close because I don’t think my dad ever knew heartbreak like this. Even in the end, his own death had been so swift and irreversible that I doubt he even had time to be sad about it, if he was even awake when it came.

I think, in retrospect, what ended up having me crumpling to the floor when I got home was the For Sale sign I had to pass on my way in. We all knew Mom was selling the house, but seeing it up close like that? So many endings this year. Grief on top of grief on top of grief. I don’t know how to sort through it all. I only know how to let it have its way with me.

When I come up for air, my mom is in the room with me, sitting quietly on the floor a few feet away. Silent tears streak down her face.

“Maybe,” I struggle to say, “If I get it all out now, I can be done with it for the rest of the trip.”

She reaches out a hand, and I take hold of it. “Was it the sign?”

“It was a lot of things, but yeah. The sign sort of pushed me over the edge.”

“I hate it, too. What other things?”

“I think—Sullivan broke up with me last night.”

“What?”

“It was really confusing, but yeah. I think—he backed us into a corner, and he did it, and now I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me.”

“Sounds like you guys had a bad fight.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Did something happen?”

“Something happened, but it wasn’t—I didn’t think it would… Anyway, it felt like he’s been building up to it. Like he just needed the right time to do it. Like he needed to be mad enough.”

“And you know what he was upset about?”