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“I had no idea.”
“You were in and out of consciousness. You’d hit your head.”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to hear about the accident, but I needed to. I’d never heard what actually happened or what the scene looked like. One minute we were driving, then a deer ran out and I slid into a tree. The next thing I remembered was waking up in the hospital with a broken arm and a brain bleed. I had been unconscious for a week. The doctors said recovery would be slow and painful. But nothing compared to the pain I’d felt in my chest when they told me Lisa was gone.
She was my first love. I’d had a ring in my pocket and was planning to ask her to marry me the next day. Christmas morning. But she died in the accident. For years, I wished I had died too.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I need to hear it.”
He sighed and rubbed at the scruff on his face. “Duke had taken another road, thankfully, because when I got to the scene, my stomach dropped. I saw your truck, and I”—he looked away and swallowed hard—“I thought the worst.”
I said nothing, and he looked down at his coffee, running his thumb around the rim.
“I ran to your door and found you slumped over with your head in the airbag. You had a gash on your forehead. You groaned, and I’d never been so thankful for anything in my entire life as I was to know you were alive. I told you to sit tight and ran around to the passenger side.”
He shook his head.
“Tell me.”
Tears welled in his eyes, and mine filled as well. “I need to know.”
He shook his head again, as if begging me not to make him say it.
“Will,” I gasped. “Please.”
He swallowed hard. “The deer was stuck in the truck's grill. A low-hanging branch from the tree you hit had impaled Lisa. She wasn’t alive. I knew you wouldn’t be able to take it if you knew, so I went back to your side and talked to you. I kept you lucid until the emergency team arrived and told them not to tell you until you got to the hospital.”
I buried my head in my hands and sobbed. The accident had happened seven years ago, but it felt like it was yesterday. The pain was so strong that it felt like someone had stabbed me in the chest.
“You can’t keep punishing yourself. She wouldn’t have wanted that. You wouldn’t have wanted it if the roles were reversed. You deserve happiness,” Will said.
“No, I don’t,” I snapped. “It’s my fault she’s dead, and I’m just supposed to live my life like nothing happened? I don’t deserve happiness, Will. She’s not here to live a happy life because of me. We were arguing. She was mad at me for making us go, and the music was up too loud. She was yelling over it and fuming.”
I pictured her face and the way she crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her chin. She’d been pissed, and I remembered thinking how adorable she looked, but I was mad too.
“I yelled back. Telling her we needed to be home. Because I had a plan. We needed to wake up at home on Christmas morning so I could propose. She was ruining the plan, and I got angry. Then the deer darted out. I would have seen it if I wasn’t so focused on Lisa and our argument.”
“Sid…” I held up my hand.
“Don’t. I don’t deserve sympathy or love. I deserve a life of misery and pain because that’s what I caused her family by taking her away.”
Will scoffed. “You’re kidding, right? I bet if you called her parents up, they would disagree. They wouldn’t want that for you. The argument wasn’t the reason you had the accident. It was the deer and the conditions of the road. You couldn’t control that, and it wouldn’t have mattered if you saw the deer or not. You would have panicked and hit the brakes and slid off the road anyway.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I muttered.
“Neither do you. The point is living like this isn’t what Lisa or her parents would want. It’s no way to honor her memory either. You’ve bottled it all up, as if she didn’t exist. You couldn’t even speak her name until now. Seven years, and you’ve never said her name.”
I stood and screamed. “You have no right!”
He stood. “I do. Because I found you that day.” He pounded on his chest. “Also, I’m your brother, and I fucking love you.” He grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled me against his chest. “Let this go. You need to live again.”
I tried to push him away, but he held me tighter. “You have to find a way to let it go.”
“I can’t,” I said.
