Page 140 of My Unfinished Heart

He will always choose Connor, and then you won’t have shit.

“I love you. I love you. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Every muscle in his body strains as he compresses Connor’s chest hard and fast. Ribs crack, the sound as frightening as the house falling down around us. “Why did you do this?”

But Connor didn’t do this.

I did this.

I bend over the sink and bury my face in my arms, fighting the rising bile.

If I’d gone back to Seattle…

If I’d taken the money and run…

I would never have fallen for Tristan, and none of this—none of it could have happened.

The next few minutes are lights and sirens and people yelling and shoving and blood transfusions and more chest compressions.

Tristan leaves with my brother to ride in the ambulance, not even bothering to ask me if I want to be the one to go, and I don’t blame him. I’m still frozen. Still speechless. When I don’t move to follow them out with the stretcher, Tristan doesn’t seem to notice or care.

I’m all alone when I find the empty bottle of pills.

Alprazolam 1mg Qty. 30.

Xanax.

I text Tristan a picture of the bottle. The stark reality of what’s happening grows larger and more real by the second. He’s going to die.

My brother is going to die because of me.

Because I took away the only person in the world who made his life tolerable. I did that. He tried to warn me, but I did it anyway. I had no idea…

I had no fucking clue Tristan was the only thing holding Connor together. How could I have known?

But Tristan knew. He’s tried to tell me a hundred times. And I sort of guessed it, didn’t I? That night at Helen’s? But I’d been too fucking concerned about my own fucked up feelings to understand.

If we had gotten to Connor’s house tomorrow afternoon as instructed—as I’d tried to insist—he would have been long dead. The bathroom would have looked like a slaughterhouse with a tub full of clotted blood and a dead man.

Tristan calls to see where I am. If I’ve gone to the wrong hospital.

I tell him I’ll be there soon, but instead of leaving the house, I go into Connor’s darkened room and sit down on the bed, staring at nothing in the darkness until my eyes adjust and something familiar draws my attention. I turn on the bedside lamp to see it better.

One of my paintings hangs on Connor’s wall, opposite the bed. I haven’t seen it in over twelve years.

The sudden memory is an attack. It’s attached to the painting. Adhered to it. I would have never remembered if it weren’t staring me in the face.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving my senior year, before the conversation with Helen about the guest bedroom, I’d had the flu. No one tracked my comings and goings at my parents’ house, so I stayed in my darkened room with water and Kleenex and a fever so high sometimes I’d hallucinate.

I slept a lot. I listened to music. I wondered if this was it. If this was how it felt to die, the ache so deep in my bones, it hurt to breathe. And I wondered how long it would take for anyone to figure out I was missing. I lost track of time. Two days, four days, I wasn’t sure.

And I wasn’t sure if Connor coming into my room to put damp towels on my head was a dream or a hallucination.

“When you get better can we go to the park together?”

“No.”

“A movie?”