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The door opened, and he looked at me with puffy red eyes. “What do you want?” Guarded and hurt. Alone.
“I heard about your dad.”
“Yeah.” Wooden and without emotion. So unlike his usual warmth. It took me aback and made me want to run away. But no, I needed to at least tell him I was sorry.
“I’m sorry I overreacted about Arianna. If you’d heard her, though, you might have gotten scared too.”
He stared down at the floor. “Is that it?”
“No. Darby, can I come in? We should talk.”
He backed up and I slipped past him. There were three empty beer bottles on the coffee table. The windows were open, making the room uncomfortably cold.
“I’m sorry, Darby. I got scared.”
He plopped onto the couch and picked up one of the bottles and dipped it backward into his mouth and then set it back on the table. “Empty.”
“Shall I get you another one?” I sat down next to him on the couch.
“I shouldn’t. I have to work tomorrow.” He still had barely looked at me.
I turned to face him and put my hand on his knee. “She’s a psycho. You should hear what she said to me.” I described as best I could her strange circular conversation, including her confession to knowing I was his girlfriend. “Or, she assumed we were because of the photograph. She didn’t say it but I think she came here to stir up trouble for you. All in all, she wanted to put doubt in my mind about the two of us.”
“But why would she do that?” Darby asked. “Why bother? She got what she wanted. Why can’t she just leave me alone?”
“You know her better than me,” I said. “What do you think?”
“She’s a narcissist who craves drama in her life. In this case, she had to create some because there wasn’t any.”
“You can be sad. I’m going to be right here.” I teared up, anxious and uncertain of what to do next.
“I thought it was over between us. I’d let myself fall for you. I’d broken all the rules I’d made for myself, but I thought it was okay because you seemed to feel the same way. There’s such an ease between us that’s natural and good. And then here come Rob and Arianna to make me miserable one more time.”
“For what it’s worth, Rob does care about you.” I explained what Rob had said about feeling jealous of him. “He said you had it all—friends, girls, sports, and grades.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “And he was a nobody. A geek.”
“Hewasreally geeky, but I liked him because he was smart. It wasn’t until later, when we were in high school, that he started undermining me. He’s not well, either.”
“They deserve each other,” I said. “As long as they stay away from us, I couldn’t care less.”
“Us? I like the sound of that.”
“I do too.” I placed my hand over his. “Can you forgive me?”
He nodded as his face crumpled into tears. “I needed you. Only you. Huck called to tell me. He’d seen it come through his feed at work. I don’t know what to do with this. He left me with one final blow, didn’t he? This…this is…unimaginable. I don’t care about the man, so why is this hitting me so hard?”
I put my arms around him and tucked his head against my chest. “Because it’s your dad and this has been really awful.”
“When I think about him all alone in that cell—it’s too much. I can’t figure out what to think or do. How am I supposed to process this when I haven’t seen him in so long?” He paused for a moment, taking in a shuddering breath. “That last night I saw him, I thought he was going to kill me. If Rob hadn’t come just then, he might have. Rob can be a jerk and you’re right, he goes out of his way to make me feel bad about myself, but he saved me that night. He and his mother helped me come up with a plan to get away from my dad. I will never forget that.”
“I know. He told me the whole story tonight,” I said. “He said he hadn’t known until then.”
“I did a great job hiding the bruises. Do you know I even perfected using concealer to cover my purple spots?”
“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“I am too. I’m just so sad,” Darby said. “I don’t want to be sad. He doesn’t deserve it.”
He sobbed, shoulders shaking. I let him cry it out and when he was done jumped up to get him a wad of tissues.
