My body—pushed beyond exhaustion—melts against his chest. “Better than good. You make a great chair.”
“I make a better bed. I’m serious,” he says, when I start laughing. “My neighbor’s cat sleeps on me all the time at home.”
“You seem more the dog type.”
“Well, I’m the horse type now. But I do love dogs. I’m going to get one soon. From an animal shelter or something. I’ve been thinking about it.”
“That’s awesome—you should. My parents just adopted a dog and they’re definitely not dog people.” He must hear the crack in my voice because his arms tighten around me. I close my eyes and feel his heartbeat drumming against my back. “Your heart’s beating fast. Are you worried about it happening again?”
“Define ‘it,’” he says.
“Falling through the ground. Going through another living nightmare.”
“I don’t want that to happen. But I’m not worried. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. No point stressing.” His lips press against the top of my head. “You really want to know what I’m worried about?”
“Yes.”
“That I did something dumb earlier. Toward you.”
“Which dumb thing are we talking about?”
“You’ve got a real wicked streak, Martin.”
I laugh. “Sorry. What was it? Tell me.”
“You think I censored what I was telling Jode and Marcus to protect you. About what we saw … your mom. I was censoring, because it felt like your thing to share, not mine. I didn’t mean disrespect. I just wanted to give you the choice.”
Anxiety curls inside my chest. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
I start to stand, until he says, “I had a feeling you’d do this. It’s like you’re always ready to bolt.”
I am always ready to bolt—I can’t deny it. But now I can’t leave or I’ll only prove him right. I try to relax again. To find the comfort in his arms again. But now my heart is racing, too. “I probably deserve that reputation.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Run?” Such a simple and yet terrifying question. “I don’t know.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I feel his disappointment. Tell him, Daryn. I promised him I would. And as hard as it’ll be to say, I want him to know. I clear my throat. “I told you about my mother, remember? When we were in Rome?”
“You told me she has depression.”
“That’s right. Sometimes, growing up—” He answered so readily and with such focus. Like he wants to ace the test on my background. It gets to me for a second, how much he cares. I have to start over. “Sometimes as I was growing up it got really bad. She’d be in her bedroom for weeks crying. It was really hard. Really hard. I hated seeing her that sad and I hated not being able to fix it. Sometimes there was no fixing it. It felt exactly like being in your truck, Gideon. Exactly.
“Time was the only thing that would get her through and give her back to us. Before we learned that, we tried everything. Dad took her to see every specialist in the country. Mom tried every kind of medication, every kind of therapy. Some things helped but like I said, there were times nothing worked.
“After a while, Dad just got worn down by it, I guess. Being so helpless. Seeing her in such bad shape. I don’t think he could stand to be around her, so he started to spend more time at work. Days. Nights. Weekends. It got to be that we hardly saw him. With Mom sick, my sister Josie stepped in and ran the house. She made dinner, did the laundry, got straight As. Josie took care of us. Josie became my mom.
“I tried to stay out of the way. I thought that was the best thing I could do. I was around just enough so they wouldn’t worry. I ran track and did well in school. But I was dying inside, watching my family fall apart.
“Then I started having visions. Once that happened, the focus switched to me. A daughter having paranoid delusions? That’s intense. That’ll steal the spotlight. I could see right away how much it scared my dad. Since he’d been through the psychiatric evaluations before with my mom, he knew all the best doctors, the best facilities. So you could say he fast-tracked me and sent me right to that institution I told you about—the one I broke out of.
“Except I knew all along that I wasn’t schizophrenic. I was seeing the future. The visions were a blessing. But my parents were never going to believe me, considering our family history of mental illness. And by sticking around, I was only drawing from the resources that should’ve been going to my mom.”
“So you ran.”
“Yes. Awful, right? I bailed on them. I ran away and started traveling the world as a Seeker. I guess that’s when the running started. I was on the move, physically and emotionally. Since then, it’s been easy to walk away from stuff that feels too close. Safer.
“Gideon, I didn’t get mad at you back there because you censored your story. I was mad because you hold this part of me now. This scary, secret knowledge that I’ve been terrified my entire life for my mom. Terrified. I’m just not used to … trusting people. Letting them in.”
“I’d never abuse that knowledge, Daryn. You don’t have to be afraid of trusting me. I’m not your parents.”
“My parents? What are you saying?”
“They bailed on you, Daryn. You can see that, can’t you?”
“My mom is sick, Gideon. Depression is an illness. I left her.”
“Is hiding behind work an illness?”
“You mean my dad?”
He shrugs—a quick, frustrated gesture. “It’s your family. I shouldn’t say anything.”
“Tell me. I want to know.”
“What your dad did was wrong. You don’t turn your back on your kids because you’re in too much pain to deal. He was the adult in the situation and he abandoned you. Your mom did, too. Maybe she couldn’t help it because she was sick, but they left you before you ever left them. It sucks that that happened to you. If you felt the way you did in my truck your entire childhood, scared like that—and your dad was nowhere to help? I want to punch something when I think about it. It may be your dad if I ever meet him.”
Emotions rise up and clash inside me like cymbals. Anger, banging against a deep, deep desire to heal, to go home.
I look up at the stars, my eyes blurring.
“I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut,” he says.
“No. I wanted to hear what you think. And … you’re right.” All this time I’ve been thinking about how I let them down, but Dad let me down, too. He gave up on me. I don’t know why I never realized it before. Why I felt like I should’ve been stronger. I was scared out of my mind. And I had no one. And yet, I miss him. How can I miss him and feel abandoned by him? “I think I need to go home.”
“You’ll do it. You’ll go home and get it worked out.”