His disappointment is visible, only for a moment. Then I watch it dissolve as he accepts it, and it feels like some of those healed-over stitches in my heart open back up. He sits up, searching for his discarded clothes, and I touch his arm, stilling him. More than anyone I’ve ever met, Charlie craves honesty, and he doesn’t punish anyone for it. He takes it as immutable and synthesizes it into his world, and I don’t want to be another person dealing in half-truths with him.
“I was staying at my boyfriend’s place.” It actually hurts to say the words. I’ve never had to before. Libby already knows, and I don’t talk about this with anyone else. I’ve never wanted to make myself that vulnerable, to see the pitying looks, to feel weak.
Charlie’s eyes hold mine.
“Jakob,” I say. “I was with him the night my mom died.”
His brow softens.
I haven’t weighed out pros against cons, costs versus benefits of telling him. I just want it out. Want to hand it—this thing I’ve never been able to fix—to him and see what happens.
“He was my first serious boyfriend. Maybe my only serious one, in a way. I mean, I dated other men for longer, but he was the only one I ever chose like that.” Over everything else. Or maybe it was that I didn’t choose him. Just fell headfirst into my feelings for him, without any caution.
“I was twenty, and I was always over at his place, so we decided I should move in. And my mom—she was such a romantic, she wasn’t even trying to talk me out of it. She wanted me to marry him. I did too.”
Charlie says nothing, just watches me, leaving space for me to go on, or to stop.
“My phone died at some point in the night.” My voice is hoarse now, like my throat is closing off to keep the rest in. But I can’t stop. I need him to know. I need to not be alone with this for another second.
“When I was with him, I’d just . . . get so swept up. When we woke up, I didn’t even plug my phone in until after we’d made breakfast.” Eaten. Had sex. Made more coffee.
The back of my nose burns. “Libby had been calling me for four hours. She was alone at the hospital, and . . .” Nothing comes out after that. My mouth is moving, but there’s no sound.
Charlie sits forward, pulls me in against his chest. His mouth presses hard against the top of my head, his thumb brushing over my shoulder.
“I can’t imagine.” He pulls my legs over his lap, crushes me to his chest again, smoothing my hair and kissing it.
I close my eyes, focusing on these sensations, in this moment. I’m here, I promise myself. It’s over. It can’t hurt me anymore.
“Libby would wake up screaming.” My voice is wet now, thin. “For months after Mom died. And I couldn’t sleep at all. I was too scared I wouldn’t be there if she needed me.”
I learned to wait until she woke in a panic, to throw my blankets aside and scoot to the far side of my bed so she could slip in beside me under the quilt. I’d wrap my arms around her until she cried herself back to sleep.
I never told her it would be okay. I knew it wouldn’t. Instead I took up Mom’s old refrain for comforting us: Let it out, sweet girl.
“Jakob was great at first,” I say. “I barely saw him, but he understood. And then he got the chance to go to this residency, out in Wyoming—he was a writer.”
“He left you?” Charlie says.
“I told him to go,” I admit weakly. “I felt like . . . I didn’t have the time or the energy for him anyway, and I didn’t want to hold him back.”
“Nora.” His chin nudges my temple as he shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have been alone through that.”
“He couldn’t have done anything,” I whisper.
“He could’ve been there,” he says. “He should’ve.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But it wasn’t just him failing me. I kept making plans to visit and then canceling. I couldn’t leave Libby. And then . . .”
He brushes my sweat-dampened bangs out of my eyes. “You don’t have to tell me.”
I shake my head.
All this time, deep in the pit of my stomach, the shadowy monster of grief and fear and anger has been in the corner where I locked it, but it’s been growing, new ropes of angry black lashing out in every direction, starving, mad with hunger.
A demon that’s going to devour me from the inside out.
“I planned a surprise visit. Got Xanax, took a bus out because that’s all I could afford, left Libby alone. I could tell as soon as I saw him that things had changed. And then, the first night I was there, I woke up in a panic. I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t find my phone. All I could think was—that something had happened to Libby. I was . . . hallucinating, almost. My chest hurt so badly I thought I was dying.