Page 88 of See You Next Tuesday

“You are so hard on yourself.” His voice was gruff, muddy with emotion. “You’re here, okay? And you’re doing your best, and you’re helping a really nice lady run for city council—”

“County council.”

“Whatever.” Gabe covered her hand with both of his. “Grief is such a mindfuck. It makes you feel like you’re living two lives—one for yourself, and one for the person who isn’t there anymore. It’s too much pressure.”

“Is that how you felt?” Anya asked. “After Danny?”

“More than I even realized.” Gabe nodded. “But we don’t have to talk about that.”

“Can we?” Anya said. “I think it might help.”

Gabe’s face softened, and he settled his body against the sleeping bag.

“So, you know how I’ve been doing therapy for the last couple years?” he asked. Anya nodded. “We talked a lot about Danny, and the stuff with my parents, obviously. And how after Danny died, I tried to, like, be him—or not be him exactly, but occupy the space he’d held in my family. Show my parents that they still had a son they could be proud of. Except—I guess it became clear to me pretty quickly that they weren’t involved enough in my life to feel pride or anything else. It was like we were all living separate lives in the same house. And since I couldn’t make them proud, I tried to make Danny proud instead.”

“Oh, Gabe.” Anya exhaled.

“I worked harder at school, picked up another sport. Got into Stanford—that was where Danny was going to go.”

“And politics?” Anya asked. “Was that Danny’s thing too?”

Gabe shook his head. “Danny wanted to be a doctor. I mean, he was only eighteen when he died, so who knows what he would have done with his life. But he wanted to be, like, the world’s best surgeon. So when I figured out how much I loved campaigning, I wanted to show him I could be great too. I wanted to win.”

“One of the best to ever do it,” Anya murmured, recalling what Gabe had told her all the way back in New Hampshire. “And end up on the cover of Time magazine.”

“God, I was such a snot,” Gabe laughed, and Anya did too. “Anyway, I worked my ass off, and I pretty much always won, and I never really engaged with how bad things were with my parents—you saw what I was like that night with my mom at the hospital. I stayed so busy, and I kept moving up the ladder. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Anya picked up on a dark note in Gabe’s tone. “But that changed?”

Gabe nodded. “In January, when I found out I didn’t get the job managing Wheeler’s presidential race. Turns out, if I thought winning made Danny proud, then I also thought failing meant letting him down.”

“But you didn’t fail,” Anya protested. “You did a great job with Wheeler’s Senate race.”

“Yep,” Gabe clipped. “When he won his highest margin ever, I thought…”

“That you’d get some credit for how good your work was?” Anya asked.

Gabe shrugged. “That he’d want to stick with the person who did so well for him. But he wanted someone with a national track record and an army of consultants, so that’s what he got.”

“Idiotic decision,” Anya muttered. Wheeler had hired the same team that managed President Flannery’s reelection campaign—a race they lost, notably.

“Thanks,” Gabe said. “I was devastated. And Tallulah—I think she saw it as a good thing? An opportunity for me to move to Australia, for us to travel together. Except, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to travel with Lu, and I didn’t want to spend months in some surf shack in Costa Rica, and I didn’t want to immediately run off and join another campaign. I didn’t want any of my usual avoidant shit. So Lu and I broke up, which was probably long overdue by that point.”

“Really?” Anya asked. “Simone mentioned something last year, about how it hadn’t been going well, but that was right before my mom got sick. The next thing I heard was that you guys had broken up.”

“Lu and I were long distance for years, and when I finally had the chance to go be with her for real, I had to admit to myself that the most appealing thing about her was that it wasn’t real. It was more like an escape. From my life, from politics, from my family.”

“And you didn’t want that anymore?” Anya asked. “To escape?”

Gabe shook his head. “I—um. I took it pretty hard when your mom died. Do you remember when I came to your house for seder last year?”

Anya’s breath caught—of course she remembered. She had stayed up all night crying afterward, feeling so pathetic that after all these years, she still wanted so desperately to be with Gabe. Despite all the evidence that it was never, ever going to happen.

But she couldn’t say any of that. So she just nodded.

“I probably acted really weird that night,” Gabe said. “I wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be. To be around your whole family like that. It all felt so lived-in—like the fights were the same fights they always had, and everyone was laughing, and you all love each other so much. I was having this internal panic attack that my family could never be like that.”

Anya closed her eyes. Of course. That’s why he’d behaved so awkwardly—it wasn’t about her at all.