Page 56 of Keep Me

“Hey Cass,” Zane said, noticing her presence beside me. He didn’t seem surprised to see her here.

Cassidy stood up before Zane even made it to us. “Be easy on yourself, Seren. We all love you, and we are all here for you.”

She turned to leave, her eyes met Zane’s as he crossed into the kitchen. They did not say anything, but I knew they passed meaning through their eyes by the way their movements slowed as they passed each other.

I was still on the floor when he came to stand in the kitchen doorway. The letter was still there, sitting between us the same way it had been when he left, except nothing between us was the same as when he left.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything for a long moment. Then he walked in and sat down on the floor across from me. Same kitchen. Same cold tile. Same letter. Both of us on the ground now, which felt right in the way things feel right when they have stopped pretending to be anything other than what they are.

“It wasn’t what you think,” I said.

“I know,” he said. But his voice said he did not quite know, not yet. “Well, I guess I don’t. I think I don’t know the difference between what actually happened and what’s in my head.”

“I didn’t love him.” The words came out steady. They were not defensive or rewriting the past to the way I wanted the narrative to be. “I didn’t even know him, not really. I knew him for three nights in a graveyard when I was sixteen, and he told me his name was Alex, and we just… sat there. That’s all it was.”

Zane’s jaw stretched tight. “I don’t think that’s all it was, Seren. It meant something to him. Even if it didn’t mean anything to you. Maybe you didn’t love him…”

“I didn’t say it didn’t mean anything to me. I just meant… I meant it wasn’t romantic,” I said. “It wasn’t even close. He was just someone who sat beside me in the dark without asking me to explain it. Without asking me to be anything other than exactly as wrecked as I already was.” I looked at the letter. “I think he needed the same thing from me. I think that’s all it was. Two people who recognized each other’s pain.”

The silence held. He did not believe me. I knew why. The romance thing… that was the truth. The rest of it… well, it was not really the truth. There was more to our nights in the graveyard than that. Things I had not fully let myself admit.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Zane said finally. “He told me he met a beautiful girl and… well, I have spent the last five years playing that memory in my head. He made it sound like you meant something to him. He said… he said you were carrying so much. He cared for you.”

“He did,” I said. “I think he really did. Just not in the way you think.”

I sat with that for a moment. I looked at the letter still lying between us and I thought about a seventeen-year-old boy sitting in a graveyard in the middle of the night, and what a person is doing in a graveyard in the middle of the night when they’re a teenager and not sleeping and the world has gone the color of nothing. I knew what he was doing. I had been doing the same thing.

“He framed it the way he did,” I said slowly, “because he couldn’t tell you what we were actually talking about.” I stopped. Started again. “We weren’t talking about much. That was kind of the point. We weren’t talking about anything important on the surface. But underneath.” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum without meaning to.

“Zane. We were both in the graveyard at two in the morning because we needed somewhere to put the weight down for a little while. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Zane went very still.

“I didn’t understand,” I said. “I should have. Looking back now, I should have known. But I was so far inside my own thing that I just thought… I thought he was like me. I thought he was someone who was hurting but holding on. Hurting but holding on.” My voice caught on the repetition. “I thought he was going to keep holding on. He told me he was holding on.”

The silence in the kitchen was the specific, airless kind that fills the space where there is nothing adequate to say.

“He framed it as a love story because the truth was too heavy to hand you,” I said. “If he had told you he’d spent three nights sitting with a girl who was also struggling to stay, you would have known. And he did not want you to know, because he loved you, and he was already protecting you from it the only way he knew how.” My throat tightened. “He turned it into something beautiful because he knew that’s what would be safe to leave you with. Something that could exist in your memory without destroying you.”

Zane’s hand was over his eyes. Just resting there, his elbow on his knee, his palm covering his face the way people do when they need a second to exist somewhere private. He lowered his hand. He looked at me.

“It was two people,” I said, “who were in a lot of pain, sitting in the dark together, helping each other stay here.” I held his gaze. “But… I guess… I guess I didn’t help him as much as he helped me. It was three nights that changed something for me. It was three nights that did not change anything, for him.”

Zane’s eyes were wet. He was not hiding it.

“And then he was gone,” I said. “And I thought it was because he had found whatever he was looking for. I told myself that for five years because the other answer was something I couldn’t carry.” My voice came out quiet. “I thought he was holding on. I really did.”

The letter’s truth was finally, fully, in the room with us.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. Not to Zane, exactly. To all of it. To the boy who had sat beside me and let me be honest without asking me to explain it. To the version of him that had deserved to be found. “I’m so sorry we both missed it.”

Zane reached across the letter and took my hand. He did not say anything. There was not anything to say that would make the shape of it different. He just held my hand on the kitchen floor with his best friend’s last words between us, and we stayed there together.

“So, when you read the letter tonight,” I continued, “you were reading it through a frame he built five years ago. And the frame was wrong.”

“He was in love with you,” Zane said, but it came out less certain than it had an hour ago. Like he was testing whether he still believed it.

“He wasn’t,” I said. “He was in pain and I happened to be in the same pain, and we found each other in a graveyard at two in the morning and we sat with it together for three nights. It was two people who needed somewhere to put the pressure and chose the same place.”