Page 88 of None Of Your Business

My throat tightens until it burns. “Am I the variable? What is it about me that makes him think I’d want to hurt my own family?”

Two guys stumble past me on the sidewalk, shouting something incoherent at each other. I keep walking, eyes glued to the pavement.

“Where are you?” There’s an edge to his voice I haven’t heard before. “Give me a street name.”

I don’t answer that either. The floodgates are open, and there’s no closing them now. I don’t fully understand why he’s the one I called, except that he’s the only person who’s never once looked at me as if I need managing.

“You know we did family therapy five years ago?” I laugh, but it’s humorless. “Here’s what I learned. Mom was officially diagnosed right after Piper. My parents had already agreed they weren’t having any more kids, and then I happened anyway.” I rub my sleeve across my face again. “I was the surprise baby.”

“Rowan, tell me where you are.”

“She got really sick after I was born. God, it must have been hell for her.” My voice wavers. “Can you imagine? A newborn, no sleep, hormones everywhere, and bipolar on top of it?”

Thinking about her like that hurts in a completely different way. Every time I do, I want to go back and protect her somehow. Tell her she doesn’t have to keep carrying the guilt for being sick during a time when everyone expected her to be happy.

Then I remember family therapy.

I remember sitting there while they explained pieces of my childhood to me.

“I think she still feels guilty about it, but she admitted she couldn’t bond with me for at least the first year and convinced herself that not bonding with me as a baby somehow created a permanent divide between us,” I choke out, my thumb digging into the hem of my sweater. “So when I started having pain as a kid, she thought she caused it. That she made me sick. That my ‘imaginary pains’ were a cry for help, or something meant to force a connection she couldn’t give me.”

“Listen to me. You are not the variable.”

I close my eyes.

“Whatever happened tonight, whatever somebody said to you—none of this means there is something wrong with you.”

The tenderness in his voice makes everything worse.

“I’m sorry.”

“Rowan—”

“I shouldn’t have called you with this.” I walk faster. “I’m heading home. I’m fine, I promise. I’m just drunk.”

“Do not hang up. Tell me where you are.”

“Goodnight, Hudson.”

“Rowan—”

I end the call before he can say another word.

Twenty-Five

Hudson

It’s almost one in the morning when I pull up to the curb outside Rowan’s house.

I know how to keep my distance. I’ve spent years getting very good at it, but standing in her driveway at one in the morning because she hung up on me, drunk and crying, distance feels like a theory I’ve completely lost interest in.

I can’t stop hearing her voice from the phone call.

Am I the variable, Hudson?

As if twenty-six years of complicated family history could be reduced to one defective piece, and she’d somehow decided that piece was her.

The way her breath hitched when she talked about being born straight into the mouth of her mother’s illness. Whatever happened tonight shattered what little composure she had left.