“I do,” he said. “What do I have to do to make you trust me?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said, looking down. The fact that I wasn’t lying made it harder to stomach—I shouldn’t trust him. But it was me that I had to keep at arm’s length. “It’s just . . . there are parts of my life I don’t talk about. Can’t talk about. And that makes being my friend hard.”
My dreamtime sketch flashed through my mind—Jane sprawled and staring, charcoal splattered like blood across the page. If you knew half of the things that make me who I am . . .
“We all have secrets, Kaira. We all have things that make us feel fucked up. But those are the things that make us human.”
He took a deep breath.
“Fine. We’ll do this. I had a little sister,” he said. “Her name was Bri.”
Was? Had? He didn’t give me time to ask. He also didn’t let go of my shoulders, though his grip was gentle. His eyes never left mine.
“She was a year younger than me. She loved me, and I loved her. We did everything together—built forts, played games, went on adventures. We were living in Maine. Little town on the ocean.” He glanced away and bit his lip, letting his hands slip from my shoulders to his pockets. He looked unbelievably sad, and I wanted so badly to make it go away. “I don’t know why my parents let us go on our own. I was only six. But I think they were tied up in work or just tired of us pestering them. So Bri and I went to the beach. Alone.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t really know,” he said. He brought his gaze back to me. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes wavered; he looked lost. “I was building sand castles. I remember that. She was playing in the waves. I told her not to go out. I told her to stay close. One minute she was there, laughing and splashing around, the next it was silent.”
“Jesus . . .”
“It’s so cliché, isn’t it? Swept away by the tide. They didn’t find her body until a week later. I guess she was caught in some fisherman’s net. Like a tiny drowned mermaid.”
I put a hand on his arm. The indignation from before was gone. It was impossible to be angry. Not when he was this vulnerable.
“I still remember how quiet it was,” he said. He looked away, toward the lake. “Almost like this. Like there was this great void in the world, like the weight of her soul was a tangible thing.”
“I am so, so sorry,” I said.
He took another deep breath and stood up a little straighter.
“Don’t be,” he said. “As you said, it’s my cross to bear. I’m the reason my sister is dead. Every time I paint, I wonder if she’d like it. I wonder if it would make her happy.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that,” I said. “You were just a kid.”
“I can. And I do. If I had been watching her, if I’d heard her call out, if I’d done a hundred other things differently, maybe she’d still be here. Hell, maybe she’d have come to Islington with me, studied dance or writing or something. I didn’t even notice her leaving, though. She’s dead because of it. But it taught me a lot about life, you know? How you just have to take each moment as it comes because at any time, it could all be taken away. And it has, many times. My parents moved a few weeks after that. That’s what started the fighting and the moving. As they’ve said, I’m the reason their relationship went downhill—they couldn’t stand living with her ghost. And although they never said it, I knew they could never stop blaming me for it.”
“Then your parents are assholes,” I said.
He gave me a side smile. “They try.”
I knew that this was the moment I should open up and tell him about Brad. Everything about Brad, and what had happened after. There was a large part of me that wanted to believe Chris and I could bridge this gap and move forward and maybe this time I wouldn’t get hurt by a boy I wanted to care about. Maybe I wouldn’t end up hurting him. But that was just a pipe dream. No one would want to be with me when they knew the truth. Hell, not even I wanted to be with me much of the time, but I was kind of stuck.
“Mind if we start walking again?” I asked. “My toes are starting to go numb.”
My toes were perfectly toasty in my boots. I just needed to start walking, to get somewhere closer to people and civilization because I needed an excuse not to talk.
“Sure thing,” he said. My hand slipped from his arm, but we didn’t stop touching, not entirely. “Anywhere in particular?”
“Writers’ House,” I suggested. “I could use some hot chocolate.”
Hands just brushing, we walked out of the woods.
It felt like a metaphor. The crows watching us from the boughs didn’t help.
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