I close my eyes so I won’t have to see his reaction, won’t see if the world suddenly ruptures at the words: “I think I hate my job.”
I wait.
Nothing.
No eardrum-destroying groan as the earth splits in two. My parents and coworkers don’t come barreling into the room with pitchforks. My phone doesn’t ring with the calls of every teacher, tutor, and coach who ever wrote me a recommendation letter or gave me a research position or sent a congratulations email.
But all of those things were, arguably, a long shot.
The only thing that matters right now, the only thing I’m afraid of, is Wyn’s reaction.
All those sensations that tend to precede a panic attack bubble up in me: itchy heat, a tight throat, a sudden drop in my stomach.
“Harriet,” he says softly. “Will you look at me?”
On a deep breath, I open my eyes.
His brow is grooved, his eyes and mouth soft. Quicksand.
“Did something happen at the hospital?” he asks.
My stomach sinks a little lower. I wish it were that simple, a concrete moment when everything went wrong. I shake my head.
Wyn’s clay-covered hands gingerly catch my wrists. “Then what?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Will you try?” he asks.
I swallow. “It’s not supposed to be about me. I’m supposed to be helping people.”
“It is about you,” Wyn says.
How do I sum it up? There isn’t any one thing I would change. It’s that for some reason, I spend ninety percent of my time excruciatingly unhappy, and the more I try to tamp it down, the more the unhappiness grows, swells, pushes up against my edges.
It’s that when I’m not here, I feel like a ghost. Like my skin isn’t solid enough to hold the sunlight, and my hair isn’t there to dance on the breeze.
“I’m not good at it, Wyn,” I choke out.
He jogs my hands. “You’re brilliant.”
“But what if I’m not,” I say. “What if I’ve put everything I have, all my time and energy, into this, and money. God, the money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, some of which my parents had to cosign because I don’t have good credit, and I—I’ve built a life where all I do is wait. Wait for the surgery to be over. For the day to end. Wait to be here, where I feel . . .”
Wyn’s lips part, his eyes painfully soft.
“Like myself. Like I’m in the right place.”
The right branch of the multiverse, I think. Where you’re still so close I can touch you, taste you, smell you.
“I loved school,” I say. “But I hate being in hospitals. I hate the smell of the antiseptic. The lighting gives me headaches, and my shoulders hurt because I can’t relax, because everything feels so—so dire. And every day, when I go home, I don’t even feel relieved, because I know I have to go back. And I . . . I keep waiting for it to change, for something to click and to feel how I thought it would, but it hasn’t. I get better at what I’m doing, but the way I feel about doing it doesn’t change.”
Wyn’s hands tense, his eyes dropping as his voice frays. “Why wouldn’t you tell me this?” he asks.
“I am telling you.”
“No,” he says roughly. “When I was there. When you needed me, and I couldn’t get to you no matter how hard I tried. Why wouldn’t you let me in?”
“Because I was ashamed,” I say. “You’d followed me across the country, and things were so hard, for you and for us. I was terrified of making them worse. I wanted to be who you—who everyone—thinks I am, but I can’t. I’m not. I never wanted to let you down.”
He stares at me for three seconds, then lets out a gruff, frustrated laugh.
“I’m not joking, Wyn.”
He scoots forward, and my knees slot in between his, both my wrists still cradled in his muddy hands, his thumbs sweeping back and forth, a slight tremor in them. “I’m not laughing at you. I just feel so stupid.”
“You? I’m the one who devoted the last ten years of her life, and a lot of imaginary money, to something she hates.”
“I . . .” He darts a glance at our hands. “You were in pain, and I didn’t even notice, Harriet. Or I did, but I thought it was about me. I fucked up, and I lost you for it.”
I shake my head ferociously. “You had bigger things going on.”
“There was nothing bigger than you,” he says raggedly. “Not to me. Not ever.”
Blood rises to my cheeks, my throat, my chest. It’s painful to swallow. “Maybe that’s what made it so hard. You built your whole life around my plans. You left our friends and missed time with your family—with Hank—and now I can’t hack it. You did all of that for me, and I’m not even the person you thought I was.”
“Harriet.” The tenderness in his voice, his hands, rips open all those hastily stitched sutures in my heart. “I know exactly who you are.”
I look up, voice shrinking. “Really? Because I don’t.”
“I knew who you were before we even met,” he says. “Because everything our friends told me was true.”
“You mean you saw a naked drawing of me,” I say.
He smiles, his hands moving to touch my jaw, neither of us bothered by the clay. “I mean that you have the weirdest laugh of anyone I’ve ever met, Harriet,” he says softly. “And it feels like taking a shot of tequila every time I hear it. Like I could get drunk on the sound of you. Or hungover when I go too long without you.
“You see the best in everyone, and you make the people you love feel like even their flaws are worth appreciating. You love learning. You love sharing what you learn. You try to be fair, to see things from other people’s points of view, and sometimes that makes it hard for you to see them from your own, but you have one. And even when you’re mad at me, I want to be close to you. None of it—none of my favorite things about you, none of what makes you you—has anything to do with a job. That’s not why I love you. It’s not why anyone loves you.”
“Maybe not,” I manage, “but it’s why they’re proud of me. It’s the thing about me that makes them happiest.”
He studies me. “Your parents?”
I dip my chin.
“Come here,” Wyn says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because I want you to,” he says.
“What happened to your Montana manners?”
“Come here, please,” he says.
I let him drag me across his lap, one of his arms roped around my back, his other hand resting on my knee, clay smudging into my jeans. “Your parents love you,” he says. “And everything they do—and push you to do—is because they want you to be happy. But that doesn’t mean they’re automatically right about what’s best for you. Especially when you haven’t told them how you feel.”
“I feel so selfish even talking about this,” I admit. “Like everything they did for me doesn’t even matter.”
“It’s not selfish to want to be happy, Harriet.”
“When I could be a surgeon instead?” I say. “Yeah, Wyn, I think it might be selfish.”