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“Bold words, as the one who never stopped complaining about how I’m the worst—”
“Please. You know that’s how I say I love you.”
She was quiet until the waiter came around, and she placed her order picking something at random off the menu in a low voice, still not quite lifting her gaze above the table. Once the waiter left, bringing us back to the tense, nervous silence that hung over us, Harper looked away with a tired sigh.
“I guess it is,” she said, her voice low. “The only thing that matters.”
“Even the things that drive me up the wall a little bit. They’re a part of who you are. And I like you—in all of who you are.”
“But we change. You change. I change. What if—” She stopped, pursing her lips, taking a long breath, and she let it out slowly and shakily through her nose. “What if we’re all… different people… from who we were ten years ago? Five years ago? Sometimes you’re a different person from who you were… yesterday. Sometimes when something happens…”
I folded my hands on the table. “Then maybe you don’t love each other in the same way anymore. Maybe you’ve been married for twenty years and something happens and it changes everything, and you don’t love each other anymore, and you go your separate ways. But I don’t think that means those twenty years went to waste. You don’t need to, like… chart out a course for your life and figure it out beforehand and then stick to it.”
She shifted, a hundred different emotions warring on her face. I decided to go for it.
“Not even if you’re doing it for someone else’s sake.”
She tightened her expression, giving me that sharp, pained look where I wanted to take everything back and make it allbetter, but—but I needed to say this. She needed to hear it. And what did I have to lose? If I didn’t put it all on the line now, I’d never see her again.
She swallowed, shakily, before she said, “It’s one thing to say it in theory…”
“Would you want someone else to do that for you?”
She winced. The silence settled heavy over us again, but I didn’t back down—sat there in the quiet and turned my gaze out to where rain droplets started to splash across the broad leaves of the dark plants, and I let the silence brew until Harper spoke, just a breath.
“I… it… it should have been me, though.” She closed her eyes, squeezing her hands on the tabletop. “That’s the problem. It was… it was supposed to be me.”
“And you think she’d have said the same thing?” I said, and she snorted, her voice thick.
“Probably. The situation was pretty cut and dry.”
I paused. “Harper… what happened?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose, turning back to the window. “I don’t want to—”
“You can trust me. It’s always been you and me.”
She sucked in a long, sharp breath, letting it out slowly, shakily, before she nodded, once. “It—it has. Somehow or other, I guess so. Just… I don’t… are you sure youwantto? You might hate me for it.”
I didn’t think anything in the world could make me hate her. “I want to hear it.”
She pursed her lips, squeezing her eyes shut, and she held there, pulled taut, for a long time before she managed words. “Okay. I’ll give you the short version. She was sick. Chronic… condition. Needed medication on standby. But something went wrong with her backup. Don’t ask what. I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. She—” She raked her fingers over her face, hervoice getting thicker. “It was just the two of us when she had an episode. Mother didn’t look after us very much—wasn’t really with it. No one else in the picture. We had to go out to the specialist to get her emergency medicine, and I… I didn’t go. Said I wasn’t going out running in the rain and that she seemed fine to drive. I just didn’t want to. That’s all it fucking was. Just couldn’t be fucking bothered—”
“Harper.” I put a hand on hers, reaching across the table and stilling her. She tensed, looking at me like a cornered animal, and I smiled, softly. “Breathe, okay?”
She sucked in a sharp breath, letting it out shakily, and then a second one, slower. She closed her eyes, continuing in a slower, quieter voice. “Our mother forgot I existed half the time. Like I said, she wasn’t… with it, and she was focused on keeping… my sister alive. So I resented her. And genuinely, it didn’t seem like it was that severe an episode, so I just… just told her to go… go take care of it herself.”
“And she didn’t make it back,” I said, softly. She shook her head.
“It got worse as it went untreated. What do you know? Almost like that’s how it fucking works and that’s what happens every time. Ended up in a car accident and before the paramedics could make it, she just… she…” She shrugged, looking out the window, trying to look unbothered. “Guess I just figured if one of us should have died out on those roads, it should have been me. But here I am.”
“I’m really sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t be. It’s my fault.”
I frowned. “You were a kid. Sounded like you were taking care of your sister more than your mom was. It’s not like you were the only one with any responsibility.”
She shrugged, going for casual, offhand. She didn’t quite make it. I’d never seen the poor girl like this before—thishaunted look on her face said she hadn’t faced these particular ghosts probably ever since it happened. “Hiding from my responsibility already killed one person. I’m not doing it again. I let her die because I didn’t feel like going out in the rain. How’s that for something to like about me?”
