His dark eyes glitter and I brace myself for the inevitable explosion of anger. But all he does is shake his head. “I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I blame you. I told you I didn’t and I meant it.”
Just like in the car with Mom yesterday, something in me breaks, long-supressed thoughts boiling to the surface. “Noelle said something once, about how even when you couldn’t forgive me, you never hated me,” I say, the words spurting out of me. “And you get so angry sometimes. You were never like that before Aubrey was killed. So what the hell am I supposed to think?”
“Aubrey dying isn’t what I couldn’t forgive you for,” he fires back at me. “Don’t you get it?”
“No. No, I don’t get it. What else did I do to hurt you so badly?”
He springs off the couch and walks to the other end of the room, his hands clasped at the back of his head. Stunned, I keep my eyes on his rigid back, watching it rise and fall with each breath as I wait for him to speak.
“You left, Dara,” he says hoarsely, keeping his back to me. “You left me and I had no one. My sister was gone, and then the second most important person in my life was gone too. And you didn’t say a word about it to me.”
“But . . .” My mind drifts back to that time, all those dark, endless days of grief. “You didn’t even look at me during the funeral, you didn’t talk to me after . . .”
“I didn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t. Losing Aubrey decimated me. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I pushed everyone away.” He lowers his arms and presses his palms to the wall in front of him. “Then I started hanging around with Hunter and playing guitar and working on the farm and I finally started to feel a bit like myself again. But by that time, you’d already left. I figured you wanted to be done with everything back here, including me.”
A different kind of guilt overtakes me. He’s right. After Aubrey died, it was all I could do not to follow her. Even breathing felt like too much effort. I needed to get away from the constant reminders, the whispers and pitying looks. But I never once considered how my absence would affect Ethan. I never once considered he might need me here, so he didn’t have to mourn alone.
He lost Aubrey, and then he lost me too.
Ethan turns around and comes back to the couch, reclaiming his seat beside me. His eyes are red, but he’s calmer now. Back in control.
“Noelle was right,” he says, reaching for my hand. He laces our fingers together, and his touch warms me straight through. “I hated that you left, but I’ve never hated you. It’s impossible for me to hate you, Dara. I’ve loved you since I was ten years old.”
I lean forward and bury my forehead in the space between his shoulder and neck. “I’m so sorry for leaving you. I seem to have a habit of taking off without warning, don’t I?”
“Maybe a little one.”
I pull back. This time, when our eyes meet, I see only him. “For the longest time, my first instinct when something feels good was to resist it. Pull away. You’re something good, Ethan, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to feel like I deserve you.”
“Is that why you freaked and ran off after we . . .”
“I ran because I was scared. You’re Ethan. Aubrey’s little brother. One of my best friends. How I felt about you terrified me. It still does.” I touch his cheek, run my fingers along the defined bones, the coarse, bristly skin on his jaw. “But in spite of the way I acted afterward, I don’t regret a second of that night. I’m glad it happened.”
“Good.” His arm circles my waist and he leans in closer, his lips grazing mine. “Because I want it to happen again.”
I let myself melt into him. Right now, in this moment, I’m not the cold, motionless statue I became. Right now, I’ve never felt more alive.
thirty
Three Months Later
IT’S THE FIRST WARM SATURDAY OF SPRING WHEN Ethan pulls up in front of my house, music blaring out of the speakers of his Saturn and the windows rolled down as far as they can go. When I see him, I exhale and rise from my spot on the steps, where I’ve been waiting for the past five minutes, soaking up the sun.
“Ready?” he asks once I’m settled in the passenger seat.
“I hope so.”
He switches off the stereo, either because he thinks loud, heavy music is inappropriate right now or because he’s worried that I do, and pulls away from my house. We drive across town in silence, but it’s a reflective quiet, not an uncomfortable one. Neither of us wants to disrupt it with words.
Too soon, Ethan parks the car and reaches behind us to the back, where the flowers lie across the seat. Twelve purple tulips, secured in place with a simple white ribbon. Aubrey loved tulips, and purple was her favorite color. Ethan hands them over to me. They smell fresh and faintly sweet, like spring.
We get out of the car, and Ethan comes around to my side, taking my hand. “We don’t have to do this today.”
“I want to,” I say, peering across the parking lot to the wide expanse of grass in the distance, the tidy rows of marble and granite, bearing names of the dead. I don’t know if it’s the sunshine or Ethan’s solid presence beside me or the new medication my doctor put me on that makes life seem more manageable, but I feel surprisingly calm here.
Ethan leans in to kiss me, wedging the flowers between our chests. “Then let’s go.”
We head toward the graveyard with Ethan slightly in front of me, leading the way. I haven’t been here since the burial, almost two years ago, but Ethan—as I recently learned—visits about once a month. He doesn’t always bring flowers but when he does, they’re never in a vase like most cemetery flowers. He’d rather place them directly on the earth, as close to her as possible.
“Here it is.”
We stop in front of a simple, black granite headstone with a swirling floral design along the edges. She’s buried near a tree, which she’d like, and close to the road, which she wouldn’t. I stare at her name—Aubrey Elizabeth McCrae—and think about the last sketch I found in my locker: me, wearing a Santa hat and smiling, dancing on Aubrey’s grave. The same sketch I shredded to ribbons and tossed in the trash. I’d considered doing the same to the paper I’d stored in my green notebook, but I ended up giving it to Mrs. Dover instead.
It happened about a month ago, when she called me into her office to talk about my future after graduation, which was creeping up fast.
“No pressure,” she said, handing me a small stack of what looked like brochures. Then I looked closer and realized they were brochures—for police academies. One had a picture of a uniformed woman on the cover who looked a little like the cop I’d seen in that movie with Travis and Paige, so long ago. “Just think about it.”
I put them in my backpack and promised her I would.