A button is pushed, the words a trigger. Fire burns in her eyes, and she says, “You’re sorry? Stop saying you’re sorry.” Her hands fist at her sides, the paper already falling apart from getting wet, and she yells, “Sorry doesn’t bring back my mother. Sorry doesn’t fix Hank’s truck or take away the ticket that led to my scar and my mother’s death.” The tears she cries are no different than those from heaven above, but they still stream down filled with her pain.
She charges me and shoves me in the chest, and I let her direct her pain at me. I can handle it, but as she’s said before, she might not survive it again. “It was the end—the end of your night, Cooper, led to the end of my mom’s life.”
Turning away, she drops her head into her hands, and the pain wreaks havoc on her body as it wins. This is it. This is when it all ends. There’s no hope of a reconciliation. There’s no getting past this, not when Story can’t even look at me.
“If I could have died in her place, I would have.”
Story sighs, and her spine straightens before she looks down the street one way and then the other. When her eyes find me again, calm has come over her. “Calliope was always meant to die young. A soul like hers was too fragile to survive. But you . . . a cloud will hang over your soul for decades to come. And every time you look up, you’ll remember that you once lived in sunshine. Mine.”
“I’m already burdened with that curse.”
This goddess, my muse, and my savior. She gave me everything I had always been missing, and now I have nothing . . . Nothing more than wanting to die at her feet. But it’s too late to spare her life from the atrocities of mine.
Her sniffling leads to a fleeing sob breaking free from her chest. Then she stops, and I’m pierced with another heartbreaking peek into her windows. I’m not sure what to say—damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I can’t bring her mom back, but I’ll sacrifice myself in her place.
The calm is washed away, and she trembles like a leaf when she says, “Your actions set off a chain of events that led to someone’s death.” She starts walking but stops, too conflicted to make a decision on a direction. Thrashing the umbrella against the brick wall next to us, she takes her frustration out until it’s bent and broken . . . like us.
After discarding the umbrella, she runs back to me, fisting my shirt and pulling me closer—a plea and a push—she begs, “If you ever loved me—”
“I love you, Story.”
“Then tell me,” she says, crying. “I need to hear the truth. Please tell me my mom’s life wasn’t taken because you were bored with yours.”
Darkness has taken hold of her, though it’s still morning. Cupping her face, I plead with her, “I can’t lie to you—”
“That’s all you’ve done.”
“No. I’ve never been more honest than when I’m with you.”
A stifled breath works through her, and she asks, “What does that say about your character?” She pushes off me, and the sudden movement has me stumbling backward. Searching my face for something I can’t give her, her tears stop, and the life we lived, we loved, leaves her eyes for good. “Hank was the match, but you lit the fuse. My mom would still be alive if you had never been out joyriding.”
And there it is—the truth.
I’m to blame for her mom’s death. It only took me having a run-in with the wrong person to set him off on his own personal path of destruction. I may not have been the one to murder with my hands, but my actions led to her death.
That’s not something I can take back or that my parents can bail me out of. They tried to protect me, but secrets always surface.
Stopping with at least ten feet between us, she adds, “You didn’t just kill my mom that night. You broke me.” The final blow lands right where it’s intended—my heart—and knocks the breath from me.
This time, I let her go, unsure what to say anymore because she’s right. If she carries that hate for me around with her for the rest of her life, I’d deserve no less.
I remain where she left me until she crosses the street and disappears inside her building. We’re lost in a circumstance that’s out of our control, pawns in a bigger game.
But the one thing I can control is not allowing my parents to win. The truth will set us free. Even if it’s away from my eternity. My parents no longer have power over me.
Without Story, what’s left in this world for me?
Getting in the car, I find the papers scattered across the front seat. She found Hank’s statement from the accident that night, but my arrest record is still lying on the passenger’s seat. She put the puzzle together just like I did. Until I saw the repercussions of my actions that night in this file, I didn’t realize that the ties that bound Story and me together were the same ones that tore us apart.
I thought the lie that would destroy us would be how I got Eliza to hook up with Troy the night of the party. Because who does that? Someone selfish. Someone evil. Someone sad. Me. Now that’s another secret that will remain buried inside me.
I can’t be mad that we ended this way. Story Salenger deserves a good life, and that’s something I would never be able to give her. I have to listen to the universe. It always has a master plan. I nod, starting the engine and knowing that I’ll take the fall and pay my dues if it allows Story to sleep better at night.
As noble as that sounds to me, the pain of losing her is too much to bear.
I wait all day, ready for it to be night.
I’m not waiting for dusk but the hours before dawn. It doesn’t take that long to be noticed and for them to take the bait just before midnight. No way would a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar car be left alone all night. Not in Troy Hogan’s neighborhood. He and his friends show up, ready for me as if they’ve been waiting for years.
I know they have because I did too for the longest time.
It may have been the car that got their attention first. But I got it second. Standing in front of his truck blocking a headlight, he’s predictable with his hand pumping into the other. Something about crossing lines too many times is being yelled across the divide, but I don’t need the foreplay. I just need this pain to be replaced by another.
The first blow takes me down.
The next has me gasping for air.
I’ll take every punch, every hit and kick if it gets me closer to blacking out. Going to hell under his hands beats the purgatory of existing without Story in my life.
Death is sweeter than the bitter taste of my past. With no future to look forward to, I don’t bother fighting back.
33
Story
I waited.
I don’t know why.
For days, I waited to hear from him again.
No calls. Or texts.
No flowers or apologies.
He didn’t even pick up his car as it sat parked outside my apartment for a week.
Instead of sleeping with him each night like I used to do, the pregnancy stick on his pillow keeps me company. There’s something about those two little lines that make me feel less . . . alone.
The vomiting subsided after twenty-four hours. That’s when I realized it wasn’t being pregnant that made me sick, but the trauma of losing Cooper. But maybe it was the sign I needed to make me take the test, along with the cashier, of course.
After doing some research, since I had time on my hands, the positive test meant I’d been pregnant for weeks, if not a month or more, before graduation. And now I’ve started puking again. I just can’t tell if it’s from the horrendous pain of losing him, learning of his part in my mom’s death, or because this baby wants my attention.
To overcome the heartbreak that has settled into my chest, I find comfort in rubbing my belly sometimes when I think of him. I’m not sure it’s healthy or even matters, but the thought of this baby created from love is more appealing than from the end of our relationship.
And then a dose of reality and the role he’s played in my life comes crashing in again. How can I forgive him? How do I show him grace for a mistake he made?
It was a mistake. My logical side knows this, but it doesn’t change the outcome or the devastation. Cooper’s actions led directly to her death and took my one constant, even if not always reliable, away from me. I was a parentless teenager with no one left to care about me.