been so sure he would leave—but I had also wanted so badly to be wrong.
Now I had my answer.
He wasn’t here. He’d split. He’d seen me at my worst—and taken off. I had stayed the night for him, but he hadn’t done the same for me.
I felt hollow.
I’d been right all along.
I stepped into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash up, and then I just stood there, looking at myself in the mirror. My hair was down, my bangs were mussed up, my eyes were puffy. I washed my face again. I flossed for a while.
You see? This was exactly why I’d tried to send him away. This was exactly why I’d argued with him about staying. To avoid exactly this moment—exactly this undeniable truth about the world and my place in it. If Duncan took off—despite all his cajoling and platitudes—who else on earth was there even hope for?
At least, before, I’d been able to hold on to the hope that I was wrong.
I should go back to sleep, I supposed.
But I was wide-awake now.
So I paced around my place for a while—looking for a note, maybe, that said, “Be right back!” Or any clue anywhere that could prove me wrong.
I milled around, looking for way too long.
There was no note. No sign that he’d been here at all.
Nothing at all to argue me away from the only conclusion I could see. There had been a question at the center of my life ever since my seizures had come back—and now, pretty much against my will, Duncan had given me the answer to that question.
An answer I would much rather have avoided for the rest of my life.
* * *
No going back to sleep after that.
Just pacing. Muttering to myself. Spasms of humiliation.
Just a shame-fueled spiral of misery that could easily have lasted until dawn—but, in truth, lasted only about a half an hour.
Until I heard a key in my door.
Duncan. Right? Had to be. Who else?
On instinct, I fluffed my hair. Like an idiot.
The door opened, but it was not Duncan. It was Alice.
“Hey!” she said. “You’re awake!” She was wearing a T-shirt that said, MATHLETE.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, nodding like it was just ordinary insomnia.
She came and sat on the side of my bed. “Babette texted me to come check on you. I was just going to peek in and then sleep on the couch.”
“Babette texted you?”
“She said you had a seizure.”
Huh. Maybe Duncan had told her?
Now I was irritated. Did we really have to wake people up about this? Were we putting a notice in the paper—or driving the streets with a bullhorn?
“I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t need to be checked on. This is not a huge deal. This is just my life.”
My tragic, hopeless, profoundly disappointing life.
I could feel the pull of hopeless thinking. It exerted a force on me like gravity—that temptation to come to simple and very dark conclusions: It was useless. I was hopeless. I would always be alone.
But “dark” wasn’t Alice’s thing. “Okay, then.” She shrugged. “I’ll make us some coffee.”
“It’s two thirty in the morning. We don’t need coffee.”
“Decaf,” she corrected, like Duh. She walked to the kitchen.
“I’m fine,” I said, not following. “You can go home.”
She turned to look at me and gave a little shrug. “I’m awake now,” she said. “And so are you, apparently.”
“Not because I want to be.”
Alice was reading my voice. She was super even-tempered, and almost nothing flustered her, but she was perceptive, too. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“What?” I was stalling.
“Whatever has you feeling so … brittle.”
“No,” I said. Then: “I don’t know. Maybe. Not really. Never mind.”
“Cool,” Alice said. And she went ahead and busied herself with the coffeemaker.
Correction: the decaf maker.
Next, as it brewed, she turned around to look at me with such a sympathetic face that I just completely broke.
I could feel my body sinking, giving in to the weight of the truth. I said, “Duncan was here when the seizure happened.”
“Oh.”
“And then he … left.”
Alice nodded, taking it in.
“Like, completely split. Vanished. Disappeared.”
Alice studied me like I was a sudoku puzzle. Then she said, “Kinda like your dad.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a sting of anger at the connection. “And I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen, and now the exact thing I predicted would happen has happened—except it feels so much worse than I imagined. Maybe if he’d just listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Except there