Page 153 of My Unfinished Heart

“How?”

I shift, trying to make peace with this conversation—trying not to run from it or resist it. “Well, by sending me out of state for one. And then when I was home in the summers, there was like—an incentive system.”

He frowns. “What kind of incentive?”

“Money. Mom gave me five hundred bucks a week to keep me out of the house. She told me to stay away from you. She told me that from the first time I saw you. She never stopped telling me that.”

Connor blinks his dark eyes, a crease forming between them. “Did you ask why?”

“I didn’t have to. I figured she didn’t want me trying to turn you against her, and to be honest…” Fuck. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this without a professional.

“What?”

I take a deep breath. “You say you went back and forth between missing me and wanting me gone. I went back and forth between wanting to know you and resenting you. It was complicated, and by then I was just enough of an asshole to want the money more than I wanted to bother fighting her about it.”

“She pitted us against each other,” Connor says.

“She tried. But it ended up I didn’t resent you. That last summer, I was pretty worried about leaving you with her, actually. My head was starting to clear, and I was starting to see a life beyond that place—beyond her influence.” I run a hand through my hair and sigh. “Also, she stopped paying me.”

“Oh.”

I feel the need to defend that particular choice. It’s one I haven’t thought about in a long time. “Every time I saw you, you seemed okay.”

“Tristan was always with me when you saw me.”

The mention of his name is like salt in a raw wound on my heart. I wince, still only remembering seeing Tristan with Connor that one day in the pool. “At least she let you have that.”

“During the day she did,” he mutters.

I look at him sharply. “What does that mean?”

Softly, he replies, “He didn’t get to spend the night.”

I need to talk about something else. Suddenly the knife is too close to the bone. “Anyway, I saw it as all or nothing. If I couldn’t get you out of there, then I had to believe you were okay. And there was no way I could get you out.”

“I understand,” he says quietly. “I mean, I didn’t at the time, but once I was living with you, I got it. I was eighteen then, and fucked up in my own way, and I remember you in that hospital room telling me about how you were eighteen at the time, and what the fuck else were you supposed to do—that you were only thinking about yourself more or less, but I finally realized there would have been consequences to kidnapping a twelve-year old. And now, in hindsight, I have to recognize you were at least as fucked up as I was. Even if you had wanted to take me to Seattle with you, your hands were tied.”

“I did think about it,” I tell him because it’s true. I thought about getting him out of there, even if it was only for a night to interrogate him about whether he was okay or not. I had dreams about it. The two of us on the road together. Running away. Making it work. Us against the world. But they were just dreams. Just fantasies. And either I was too big of a coward or too selfish at the time to make them a reality. “I don’t blame you for hating me.” I hate me too.

“I wasn’t fair with you when you came back,” he says.

“You’d just lost everything.”

“Not everything. I got you back. And then I shit all over it.”

“I deserved that, though.”

“You didn’t,” he says firmly. “You did everything you could to make it okay for me, and I still wouldn’t let you.”

I don’t argue with him. I’ve had the same thought in terms of what the fuck else could I have done? But the answer to that is so obvious now that I won’t even put the words out there. I could have been his brother. What I’d been instead was his landlord, leaving him to fend for himself, too afraid he’d condemn me the way he’d condemned me in the hospital. What I should have done was sat him down and fought for him. I should have had this conversation or something like it once he was walking again, once the initial shock of what happened to him had abated. I should have forced the issue, because it would have worked. I was the big brother, he was the kid. He would have listened. He wanted to love me, and I refused to let him because I didn’t know how to love him back.

That day on the screen porch—the one that’s been so overshadowed in my memory by Jayne’s appearance in my t-shirt—what happened before that was Connor had tried. He’d put aside his doubts and everything he’d been told or believed about me, and he reached out to find the connection that was suffocating even as it lived and breathed between us, and I’d run away from it. From him. I shut him out.

It was the wrong path. A bad path. I was a coward.

“I wouldn’t let you, either,” I say.

“And now?” he asks.