Page 91 of Smoke and Glitter

He doesn't pounce on it. He picks up his fork again. For a few seconds I listen to the noise around us and wish he'd chosen literally any other subject.

"I made choices around him too," I say.

Jake glances up. I hadn't planned to tell him this part.

"Anna offered me London before everything happened."

His fork stops. "The first time?"

I nod. "I said no."

"Because of Sam?"

"Because I wanted to stay in Chicago." Even to me, it sounds incomplete. I turn my glass between my hands. "Because of Sam."

Jake stays quiet.

"Anna called one morning while I was at his apartment, and I turned her down in less than five minutes. Then I got back into bed with him. He put his arm around me and went back to sleep."

"Did you tell him?"

"No."

Saying it out loud makes the problem clearer than I want it to.

"He had no idea I'd just made a decision with him in the middle of it." I stare down at the table. "I wanted that to mean something, but I never gave him the information that would've let it mean anything to him."

Jake's expression softens. "That sounds more like you."

I look up. "Excuse me?"

"Deciding something enormous by yourself and then being pissed nobody noticed."

"I liked you better when you lived several thousand miles away."

"No, you didn't."

Unfortunately, I didn't.

Jake reaches for his glass. "You've been doing versions of that since you were sixteen."

My stomach tightens. "Doing what?"

"Handling whatever you need without telling anybody there was a need in the first place."

"That's not what happened with Sam."

"Not all of it," he says. "But you can't tell me none of it."

I put my glass down harder than I mean to. Jake doesn't flinch. "When everything happened with your dad, your mom stopped functioning for a while and your brother was barely home. I came over one night and found you making spaghetti while the whole house was falling apart around you."

The pub seems to get louder around us. "Jake."

"I asked if you were okay. You told me somebody had to be fine."

The kitchen comes back before he finishes: the pot boiling too hard because I was trying to do three things at once, Jake at the table with his backpack still on because he'd come straight from school.

"You were good at handling it," he says. "You still are. But you didn't ask anybody to help, and you didn't tell us what you needed. You just kept cooking."