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“I’m going to tell you the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “Something no one knows about. I’ll give that to you, and if you want to ruin me, you can. If you decide I’ve got to pay for it in ways I haven’t already, then I will. You can hold it over my head, destroy me anytime you want. I’ll give you that, and if I do, I’m hoping that . . .”

He breaks off, takes a breath.

“I’m hoping that if I show you that trust—not that you’ll keep my secret, but that you’ll know the right thing to do—then you can trust me, too.”

“Micah, that’s not—”

“Ava, I need to tell someone,” he says.

I know what it’s like to need, know what it’s like to hold heavy things in your heart and carry them with you night and day. This time I reach out, take his hand.

“I’m scared,” I tell him.

“Me too,” he says, barely a whisper. He squeezes my hand, holds my gaze.

“I’m the reason Quentin Wagner is in a wheelchair.”

Thirty-Seven

Micah

She stares, uncomprehending.

I expected revulsion, disgust, a slew of questions maybe. But not understanding wasn’t in the deck that I thought she’d be drawing from.

“Quentin, Hailey’s brother,” I explain. “He’s—”

“I know who Quentin Wagner is.” She pulls her hand away from mine, squeezes her eyes closed for a second, opens them again. “Tell me.”

“You’re sure?” I ask, but the truth is that I don’t know if I could stop if she wasn’t, because I just said the worst thing, and the world didn’t end. It didn’t end, and Ava is still sitting in front of me, telling me to go on.

“It was a hit-and-run, right?” Ava asks.

“I was out at Ethan’s, you know he’s got that brew barn—”

She winces, and I curse myself for being an idiot. Of course she knows. Ava waves her hand, telling me to continue.

“We were drinking, and I was planning on staying over, but I got agitated, and I just couldn’t be around people anymore. I knew I shouldn’t drive, but . . .” I shrug, not wanting to tell the whole truth, even though I’m coming clean right now. Not wanting to say that I’d driven home buzzed more than once, and seen Mom navigate interstates with slurred speech, so I just wasn’t that worried about it.

“It was five miles and three in the morning,” I say. “And I figured, what could happen? Who else is going to be out right now?”

Turns out the answer to the first question is A hell of a lot, and the second is Quentin Wagner, because, as Hailey told Ethan later, he’d just been in a fight with Betsy Parker that had him pissed as hell and not in his right mind, either. We’d both made bad decisions, but he was sober as a judge when I blew through the four-way stop and T-boned him, sending his Escort rolling, him inside.

“I hit the driver side,” I tell Ava now. “Dead center.”

I drop my gaze and shiver, remembering the impact, my face meeting the steering wheel, glass spraying, my body relaxed because I never saw it coming, and was drunk as hell to begin with. It took me a minute to figure it out, to put together why I was bleeding, why the wind was in my face even though I was in my car, and what my one working headlight was shining on.

It was the undercarriage of Quentin’s car, wheels still spinning. I think in that moment there was a little bit of a hero left in me, a man who thought he could pull the other driver free and face the consequences. But when I got up to the car and saw who it was—a guy who had told the other seniors to back off when the hazing got too rough, a guy who handed me the water hose during two-a-days and said, “Not so fast, kid, you’ll puke,” then didn’t make fun of me when he was right—I wasn’t a hero anymore. I wasn’t even a man. I was just a scared, drunk kid who thought he was watching a real hero die.

“I could see his spine,” I tell Ava. “The airbag didn’t deploy, or maybe his car was so old it didn’t have one. But he had his belt on, and that’s what kept him in the seat. Part of him, anyway. He was folded over the console. Stretched out like a rubber band right on the verge of breaking. He’d just . . .” I stop, take a breath. “He was torn open, and I could see where his spine wasn’t together anymore, didn’t . . . didn’t join.”

I’d pulled out my phone, dialed 911, finger hovering over the call button. Then my own breath had been blown into my face. There was the smell of beer and blood, the metallic hint of hot oil running out of a cracked gasket, and—I swear—the salty tang of spinal fluid pooling in the seat underneath him. And everything inside of me that was ever brave or good crawled into itself and died.

“I thought he was dead,” I tell Ava now. “I swear, I thought he was dead and there was no use calling anyone. I’m not saying it like it’s a reason, or even an excuse, I just . . . I freaked out. I freaked out and went home. By the time I got there, somebody had found him. I walked in the door and the police scanner was blowing up. I ran upstairs, got my dad and he . . . he . . .”

“Covered it up for you?” Ava asks.

“Yeah,” I tell her, fresh shame flooding me. “So, there it is. I crippled Quentin, and I’ve had to look Hailey in the face every day since then and act like I didn’t. And if you think that I should come clean, then I will, because you’re a good—”