Some secrets are better off kept.
I take off my jeans and crawl under his covers, wanting to be close to him even though I can’t be and won’t ever be again. My knee brushes against something soft, and I pull a T-shirt out from under the covers. Yesterday morning, he borrowed a clean one from my dad, and last night, he didn’t come inside to get his old one before leaving.
I love you.
You don’t have to say it back, but don’t tell me how I feel.
I lift the shirt to my nose—breathing him in, missing him, wanting to go back in time even if nothing could have changed—and then I tuck the shirt under my cheek and fall asleep alone.
Chapter Twenty-One
“DO YOU WANT to stop at IHOP?” Rowan asks from the driver’s seat of my car. This afternoon, she drove my Civic from her place to my place and picked me up to head back to school. I didn’t bother offering to drive, and she didn’t bother asking if I wanted to.
“I look like crap,” I mutter with my forehead resting on the cool glass of my passenger-side window, every single hair follicle reminding me of how much I had to drink last night.
“You’re wearing alien-sized sunglasses,” Rowan counters. “No one can even see you.”
I turn my head to give her a look, but it’s lost behind sunglasses that are just as big as she said they are.
“Are you glaring at me right now?” she asks.
“Something like that.” I lay my head back against the glass with delicate precision, careful not to wake the troll hammering at my brain.
This morning, after dry-heaving in a hot shower and finishing washing up in a cold one, I got dressed and faced my dad in the kitchen. He slid a coffee and a stack of home-made pancakes in my direction as I took a seat at the breakfast bar.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
The truth was, I felt too shitty to even look at his pancakes. I slid them to the side and glued my cheek to the cold granite countertop. “Bad.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened with Joel?” my dad asked, and my heart pinched at the mention of his name.
“Not really.”
My dad rested his big hands on the counter and said, “Okay . . . but you know you can, right? I’m here to listen if you need me to . . .”
I closed my eyes for a long moment before I began to sit up. My head protested, but I managed to get my elbows on the bar and the rest of me into an upright position. “Dad, about yesterday . . . I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean anything I said.”
He frowned at me. “Sweetheart . . . we both know that’s not true, and I think it’s time we talk about it.”
I didn’t want to talk about it, but my dad lured me into a conversation, and every confession I made felt like a weight lifted from my soul. I told him about how much I hated my mom, about how much I needed a mom because, even though he had been the best dad a girl could ask for, there are some roles a dad just can’t fill. I told him about the night I heard him crying after she left, and his eyes filled with fresh tears as he apologized for me having overheard. I told him that I hated her for what she did to him, that I hated that he never moved on or dated anyone else.
And my dad told me things too, things I didn’t want to know but that he said I should understand.
“Your mom got pregnant with you when we were nineteen, Dee,” he said as I finally began picking at my pancakes. It was easier than looking him in the eye. “We hadn’t even been dating that long.” He sighed and raked his hand through his dusty blond hair, like he was trying to work up the courage to tell me something he didn’t want to admit even to himself. “She never loved me,” he said, quietly, “not really . . . I thought I could love her enough for both of us, but . . .” He shook his head at some unseen memory he was reliving. “Anyway, when I found out she was pregnant, I immediately got all these ideas in my head about a marriage and a house and a family. And your mom went along with it because—even though you don’t think she did—she loved you. She did her best . . . it just wasn’t enough.”
I sat in my chair, my headache forgotten while I listened intently to every word my dad was sharing. I clung to each new piece of information, saying nothing because I didn’t want to risk him shutting down and leaving me in the dark.
“Sometimes, I would come home from work and your diaper would be filthy, and it was just because your mom was too overwhelmed to even change it. Looking back now, I realize she needed help, like professional help, but at the time, I thought I could do it all. I tried to be everything for you both, and I’m sorry.”