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But Jace, always so incredibly perceptive Jace, must have been able to somehow read all of that on my face. Tilting his head down, he meets my gaze with those warm brown eyes of his.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
I swallow against the lump in my throat at how unreasonably kind this man is to the girl who has done nothing but make his life hell since the moment I met him.
“Yes,” I manage to choke out in reply.
He says nothing. Only watches me, waiting in silence while I swallow again and gather my thoughts.
“I, uhm…” I begin, blowing out an unsteady breath. “I had a brother. Victor. He… died.”
Pain floods Jace’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
I nod, acknowledging it, while sorrow rips through my soul. I draw in another shuddering breath, waiting for it to pass, before I can manage to continue. “He was just one year older than me, and we were inseparable. Best friends. We did everything together. We raised so much trouble. Fun trouble.”
A wistful smile blows across my lips as those old memories swirl through my mind.
“We didn’t have bodyguards as such back then,” I continue. “But we had people who watched us. To make sure we didn’t get into too much trouble.” Pain and regret slices through me, but I force myself to keep speaking. “One day, when I was eight and he was nine, we snuck away. Like we had done hundreds of times before. Victor wanted to go to the river that ran through the grounds at our summer vacation house. So we did.”
My heart starts to pound again. Jace instinctively tightens his arm around me.
“At first, we just swam in the river like we always did. But then he wanted to go to a better spot. A more fun spot, he said. So I followed him to a place where massive boulders lined the riverbank. Almost like cliffs.” My voice starts to tremble and I choke out my next words. “He wanted to jump from them and into the river.”
Understanding fills Jace’s eyes, but he says nothing. Only keeps watching me in silence. As if he knows just how badly I need to tell this entire story. How badly I need to share it with someone else. Someone who might be able to understand.
“I told him not to.” Tears prick behind my eyes as I hold his gaze. “I begged him not to. I told him that it was too dangerous. I told him that we should go back. I even took his hand and tried to physically pull him back.” Pain spears through my heart. “He just grinned at me, gave me one of those troublemaker winks that he had given me thousands of times, and then ran towards the cliffs.”
A sob rips from my chest. I drag in a breath and have to clear my throat before I can continue.
“He hit his head on the way down. I rushed down to where I could wade into the river and then I…” Lingering panic pulses through me, as if I’m still there in that river, desperately searching for my brother. “I tried to find him. I dove in, over and over again, but I couldn’t see him. The water was so dark.”
Jace’s eyes are full of pain and sadness as he holds my gaze.
“When I couldn’t find him, I realized that the current might have pulled him away, so I ran down along the water.” I swallow, the spikes of pain inside me almost unbearable. “I found him by the riverbank farther down.” Coldness spreads through my soul again, and I press myself harder against Jace’s warm body. “Even after all these years, I can still see his glassy blue eyes staring unseeing up at the sky while his body bobbed there in the shallow water.”
The agony and sorrow in Jace’s eyes deepen, and he hugs me tighter.
I wait for him to say the same thing that everyone else has said. The therapists I went to as a kid after that, the few friends I’ve told over the years, my parents. They’ve all said the same useless thing when I’ve told them this.
It wasn’t your fault.
I know that it wasn’t my fault! But it still doesn’t change the fact that Victor is dead. That he died that day in the river. That I found his corpse bobbing in the water and staring up at the sky with dead eyes when I was eight years old.
But that’s what they all do. That’s what they all say. And I hate it when people immediately start trying to fix it. To fix me. To give me a quick solution so that we can move on from this awful topic. It wasn’t your fault, so let it go. That’s what they’re essentially saying. Every time.
That’s the problem with a lot of people. They don’t know how to listen. Truly listen. They’re only listening while waiting for their turn to speak. And sometimes, I don’t want to hear what they have to say. Sometimes, I just want to tell someone and have them hear it and acknowledge it. I don’t need them to come up with a solution for me. I just want to share the burden for a moment.
Jace’s eyes are brimming with sincerity as he holds my gaze and says, “I’m so sorry that that happened to you. And to your brother.”
I stop breathing as I wait for the inevitable but.
It never comes.
No ‘but it wasn’t your fault’ and no ‘but if you do this or that you’ll get over it’ or anything like it. Nothing. Just a true heartfelt acknowledgement of my pain.
He hugs me tighter to his chest.
My heart almost breaks.
