He starts to reach out, but stops himself, shoves his hands in his pockets again. “I’m so sor—”
“It’s okay,” I cut in, surprisingly calm. I take my first breath since “grandpa” left his mouth, then offer him a weak smile. I try to joke, “Hundreds of hours of therapy have prepared me for this.”
Leo doesn’t find it funny. He frowns, his eyes filled with sadness. “What happened?”
I’ve thought about this moment, this exact situation, like the many other situations I might face when it comes to Leo, and I know that I have a choice to make. I can either give him the vague just-enough-to-satisfy answer, or I can give him the truth. Every heartbreaking ounce of it. “We should talk.”
Leo
Mia walks me toward a little courtyard right near the spot where Laney was shot because we’re at the same hotel that held the senior prom all those years ago. I don’t tell her this, though, and I don’t tell her that this place brings back some of my darkest memories. I let her sit on a bench, and I sit down beside her. And I don’t say anything, because I know what it’s like to have a million thoughts running through your head, and picking out the one you want to start with takes enough effort.
For minutes, we just sit there, silent, looking at the fountain ahead of us. I can tell she’s crying; the tears are there, but the sounds are not. I want to hold her. I’d give anything to be able to. Or just take her hand in mine. I won’t do either. I’m not deserving of her touch. “It was a heart attack,” she says, her voice so quiet I barely hear her. I don’t turn to her, because the devastation in her voice is hard enough to accept; seeing it would destroy me. Somehow, she manages to keep talking. She tells me that the RV road trip with her grandpa’s friend Philip was actually a trip to Tennessee where Tammy, Holden’s mom, lived. He chose to go there so she could care for him after his quadruple bypass heart surgery that was recommended to him after his first heart attack only months prior. Mia had no idea about any of it. According to Tammy, that was John’s wish, and as much as Tammy didn’t agree with him, she respected that. It made sense now, Mia says, how he was acting when he got back. It had only been four weeks since the surgery.
“I was outside with you when he collapsed,” she says, and my mind is still playing catch-up to all the other information she’s given me that it takes a moment for her last words to sink in. It happened the day I left. While I was telling her that I couldn’t be around her anymore because it was too hard, her grandpa was dying, and she was too busy letting me destroy her.
“The last thing I remember was him yelling at my dad about me, and how to take care of me, and the whole time he was the one who needed taking care of, and I…”
I know I should console her. Say something to let her know that it isn’t her fault, but I just stare at the fucking fountain, and I don’t look away.
It’s the silence that kills me, the moments between her words.
“For a long time, I was convinced that I literally broke his heart.”
My throat closes in, catching a gasp, and I realize my knees are bouncing, my legs shaking. My hands, too. I look down at them, will them to stop, because now is not the time to lose it. When my mind finally kicks in, reminds my body that it needs air to live, I choke on the oxygen filling my lungs as if they reject it, yell that it doesn’t belong there, inside me. Guilt is the most painful emotion because it carries with it a life sentence of what-ifs. And what ifs are the most critical questions imaginable. Like a ripple effect of torture. What if I’d said something on the lake back when we were kids? She wouldn’t have an eating disorder, and then she wouldn’t—
“I thought that him finding out that I was bulimic…” she says, cutting through my thoughts. “I thought it made him feel like he’d failed me somehow, and that was so far from the truth.” Because it wasn’t him who failed her. It was