How could I have been so selfish? When I looked at him, all I saw was strength and determination and I wanted that so much for myself that I let him give it to me. I let him build me up when, all along, he was crumbling inside. He gave me everything he had and left nothing for himself.
“Whenever he spoke to Rylan, I would quietly ask him if he’d taken his medication,” Kat continues. “The doctors had him on all kinds of things for depression and anxiety and I just thought maybe he wasn’t taking them or he’d skipped a dose. I was just so happy to have him back that I didn’t want to upset him. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Her reasoning is the same one I gave myself. I didn’t want to force him to talk if he wasn’t ready. He’d been through so much and I just wanted him to be happy.
“I recognized you when I first got to the hospital,” she suddenly says, giving me a small smile. “From the night he was deployed. I was home on break and you stopped by the apartment, do you remember?”
I want to laugh and cry all at the same time. I’m strangely happy that she remembered me and it was probably the initial reason she didn’t immediately kick me out of Eli’s room, but I hate thinking about that night.
“Yes,” I reply softly. “You gave me a letter from him.”
She nods, her smile getting wider.
“I’m such an idiot. When you told me your last name, I knew it was from the stables he worked at and I thought it was a resignation letter or something,” she laughs. “It was a love letter, wasn’t it? I had a mushy love letter from my brother in my hand and I didn’t even read it.”
I can’t help but laugh right along with her even though the memories of that night, reading his words, losing control of the car, losing my dreams…it all tries to overwhelm me. There’s something about her laugh, though, so kind and genuine that I can do nothing but join in.
“Not exactly,” I admit. “He was kind of a jerk in that letter.”
She purses her lips and shakes her head.
“Yep, that sounds more like my brother.”
We laugh together again and I try not to feel guilty that I’m sitting here laughing and smiling when Eli is upstairs fighting with his grief and his fractured mind. Kat makes it easy to relax for a little while and let go of the worry.
“You’ll be happy to know that he more than made up for being a jerk. I have a whole shoe box filled with mushy love letters.”
She claps her hands together like a toddler and I laugh louder.
“Mushy love letters that you will absolutely let me read one of these days so I can tease him, right?” she asks.
“I don’t know, how horrible was he to you when you were growing up?” I barter, taking a sip of my coffee.
“Are you kidding me? He was the worst. Anytime a guy came to pick me up for a date, Eli would sit right next to him on the couch, put his arm around the guy, and tell him he knew fifty different ways to kill a man and hide the dead body,” she tells me with a roll of her eyes. “And don’t even get me started on Rylan.”
Kat falters when she says his name, but I can tell it feels good for her to talk about him and remember him. She spent all this time worrying about Eli and not being able to grieve for Rylan on her own and I know she needs this.
“Did you know he lived with us?” she asks.
I nod my head, remembering when I came home from college and spent the first few days flirting with Rylan just to make Eli jealous. We only spoke a handful of times, but he was definitely a talker. I knew his entire life story five seconds after meeting him. After Eli and I got together that summer, he confirmed what Rylan had told me, and even though he was pissed about the whole flirting thing, I could see every time he talked about his friend how much he cared about him.
“So, imagine being a teenager and having not one, but two overprotective brothers trying to scare away your dates,” Kat says with a roll of her eyes. “It was like good-cop, bad-cop, but they forgot who should be which and they both decided to be the bad cop. My prom date senior year dropped me off five blocks from our apartment because he was sure Eli and Rylan were waiting up with shotguns in their hands.”
We share another laugh, both of us pausing to drink more of our coffee. I’m jealous of what she had growing up and I want to cry at the unfairness of it all. She had two men in her life, and they all cared so much about each other. I can’t imagine how much she must be hurting right now losing one of them, and not knowing if the other will ever be okay.
“I wish I’d had something like that.”
She cocks her head as she looks at me.
“You don’t have any brothers or sisters?”
I shake my head. “Nope, just me. My father died when I was a teenager and I recently found out my mother never wanted children and has always hated the sight of me.”
Kat’s smile falls and I quickly let out a small laugh to reassure her.
“It’s fine. It’s something I’ve sort of always known. Eli was there when it happened. He made it better. He always makes everything better for me.”
My voice cracks with emotion and Kat reaches over to place her hand on top of mine.
“I want to help him, but I don’t know how,” I whisper, trying to hold back the tears.
“I have a question, and it might seem a little weird. When exactly did you two get back together after he came home? Like, the exact day?”
Pausing for a minute, going back through the time we’ve spent together, I’m shocked to realize it hasn’t been as long as I thought it was. Being with Eli always makes me lose track of time, makes me feel like I’m moving twice as fast as the rest of the world.
“Well, we saw each other again for the first time soon after he got back to Charleston. But it was a little complicated and difficult. So, technically, three weeks ago. Three weeks ago today, actually,” I admit, feeling my cheeks heat with embarrassment that I sort of just told Eli’s sister the day we first had sex again.
She ignores my discomfort and smiles the biggest smile I’ve seen yet.
“I think you already did help him,” she tells me.
I shake my head in confusion and she continues.
“Three weeks ago today, is when he stopped waking up with nightmares every night,” she tells me softly. “I remember because it was the same day my daughter was cutting a tooth and I was up in the middle of the night anyway. And he never woke up. He’d been waking up screaming every night since he came home, and that night, he never woke up once. Or any night after that until he moved out and I wasn’t keep track of his sleeping habits anymore, but I’m pretty confident he wasn’t having them at his new place either.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, hoping that what she’s saying is true.
“You already helped him, Shelby, without even knowing it. I’m sure you’ll be able to do it again.”
“Kat!”
I open my eyes and we both look up when we hear the shout, seeing Daniel jogging across the cafeteria to us with a worried look on his face.
“I’ve been looking for you, I tried calling your cell,” he tells her when he gets to our table.
“Sorry, I must have left it back in the room. What’s going on? What happened?”
He looks back and forth between us before squatting down next to his wife and grabbing both of her hands.