Page 156

Sighing, I sat down on the beach and took a deep breath. I stared at her message for a long moment, my thumb hovering over the screen. I didn’t want to explain any of this to anyone. But more than that, I didn’t want to ruin her first Thanksgiving married to May either. They had a whole thing planned with the crew. I didn’t want to ruin their day too.

But if I didn’t call her, she’d probably pester the fuck out of me until I did. Theo had sounded the alarm just enough to get her attention, and there was no stopping her now. I dragged a hand over my face, tasting blood again where my lip pulled, and finally tapped her name. The phone rang against my ear while I stared out at the dark water, wondering what the hell I was supposed to say. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to formulate a plan because she answered too damn fast.

“All right, tell me what—”

“I came out to my family at dinner,” I said, interrupting her. She let out a small sound of surprise, but I kept talking because if I stopped, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep going. “He was just sitting there talking about politics like he always does, and all I could think of was how fucking uncomfortable Theo looked, and how I was so fucking tired of listening to him say the same shit he always does. Enough was enough, and I said it, and there was no taking it back. And it went exactly like I thought it would, right up until he hit me. I could’ve fought back, and I should’ve—I could’ve laid his ass out—but I’m so fucking pathetic that I didn’t want to hurt him. I’m a goddamn pushover.”

“Rhodes—”

“And all I can think is how I fucked up,” I continued over her, unable to stop the spiral. “I ruined her Thanksgiving, and I don’t know what’ll happen with my mom. What if I screwed everything up? What if she gets worse and I’m not there? What if she has a bad day and Jude’s the only one there to handle it? What if she needs me and he decides I’m not allowed through the goddamn door? What if something happens and nobody calls me? Or she ends up in the hospital, and he won’t let Jude tell me? Or what if Jude does, but Dad’s already told the hospital not to let me see her? What if I’m not there when she… when she…”

My voice broke on a sob before I could force the rest out. I clamped my mouth shut, but it didn’t matter. My chest seized around the words I couldn’t say, my shoulders shaking as I bowed my head and pressed the heel of my free hand to my eyes. I’d spent months preparing for the reality that I was going to lose her. Doctors, treatments, statistics—I could process all of that because it came with facts. They came with steps, plans, and things I could realistically do.

But this?

The thought that when the end finally did come, I might not be there because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut fucking terrified me.

I dragged in a breath that didn’t help. I still couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t put when she dies into the world and make it real, especially when all I could think about was how her final moments might happen without me.

“I’m right here,” Sariah whispered.

That was it. No questions. No trying to fix it. No telling me what I should’ve done differently or what came next. She didn’t fill the empty space between us with reassurances I wasn’t ready to believe and didn’t offer solutions to problems I couldn’t solve tonight.

Her breathing filled the silence as I sat on the cold sand and tried to pull myself back together. The ocean rolled steadily in front of me, waves breaking against the shore while I counted each ragged breath I pulled in.

She knew me well enough to understand that sometimes words only gave my brain something else to pick apart, so she offered nothing more than the understanding that, even from a thousand miles away, she refused to leave me alone with this.

Eventually, the shaking in my hands eased, and my lungs stopped fighting me quite so hard. The anger was still there, tangled up with everything else, but it no longer felt like it was going to be the death of me.

“You don’t have to figure any of this out tonight, Rhodes,” she said softly. “You don’t have to make a plan. I know it’s who you are, but it’s okay not to know what happens next. Just let yourself feel the hurt.”

I shut my eyes. That was somehow harder than anything else she could’ve asked of me. I knew how to do a lot of things, but willingly letting myself feel pain wasn’t one of them.

“You didn’t ruin anything,” Sariah continued. “And you aren’t responsible for what he chose to do with the truth you gave him.”

My throat tightened, and I couldn’t answer. I wanted to believe her. Logically, I knew she was right. I hadn’t forced my father to say those things. I hadn’t made him hit me. I hadn’t made him decide that love came with conditions.

But guilt wasn’t logical.

It kept dragging me back to Mom’s face. To Jude’s. To our abandoned Thanksgiving dinner. To every horrible possibility my mind had already created.

“I love you,” she told me. “You know that, right? Whatever happens next, that’ll never change.”

“I know,” I replied as a shaky breath escaped me. And I did. I never questioned her love for me. Sariah had seen me angry, terrified, injured, grieving, broken, and everything in between. She knew every ugly thing I tried to hide from everyone once, and not once had her love felt like something I could lose by saying the wrong thing or becoming the wrong version of myself.

“Good.”

We fell silent again, and she stayed on the phone with me while I stared out at the ocean. The cold had worked its way through my clothes and parts of me were numb, but I still didn’t move. Some part of me needed that while neither of us said another word.

CHAPTER 70

Rhodes

When I pulled into the alley behind my house, it was late enough that every house on the street had gone dark except mine. The warm glow of the kitchen lights held my attention as I killed the engine and sat there. My first thought was Jude. My second was Mom.

Both sent a new spike of anxiety straight through my chest. I grabbed my phone from the cupholder and checked it again, even though I’d spent the drive back doing that far more often than was considered safe. I had no missed calls or texts from Jude or Mom. I had a handful of new messages from Sariah after we’d hung up. And then there was Theo. The previous texts and voicemails had stacked up, but after talking to Sariah, he’d stopped reaching out.

Apparently, that hadn’t stopped him from trying to help in his own way.