I rolled my lips together and shook my head. I’d run that night, too, fled like my life depended on it because what he made me feel eclipsed all my better sense.
“So it’s not just about what he does and the eyes that might be watching. It’s not about your past and the douchebags you’ve dated before, and I think you know that. Those are excuses. But they’re not the reason.”
I didn’t like this conversation.
I didn’t like these questions.
I didn’t like that this was so hard for me and that I couldn’t just sayFuck what everyone thinksand take what I wanted.
That girl was still simmering underneath the surface, carefree and desperate for the kind of love that Archer would give me. It would be passionate and fierce. Nothing with us would be average or safe ornormal. We’d argue, and it would feel like foreplay. We’d push and challenge and bicker, and it would be like sparks on a dry pile of tinder.
But I was so afraid of those flames. Was so afraid of who’d get burned in the process.
“I’m scared,” I told him.
His eyes glistened. “I know, bug. But you don’t need to be.”
“How do you know that? How could you possibly know that?”
Then Pops did something I hadn’t seen since the day Gavin was born. He cried.
It wasn’t much, just a single tear escaping from the corner of his eye.
“You’re not her.”
My heart stopped. “What?”
Another tear slipped down his cheek, but he didn’t wipe it away. “You’re not her, Remi.”
I didn’t need to ask who. I didn’t need to ask what he meant. Goose bumps pulled at the hair on my arms. “I know.”
He leaned forward. “You’renother.”
I was crying too. Hell, I’d never stopped. “Iknow.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” Pops sat forward and gripped my hands in his. “You’renot her. You made one mistake, and I don’t even want to call it that because we love that boy so much—but something changed in you when he was born. I have watched you work yourself to the bone to prove that you’re not like her, over and over for the last ten years, but sometimes I worry you don’t actually believe it.”
The intensity of his gaze was a boot to my chest, a relentless crushing sensation, as was the unchecked emotion he usually never showed. “Pops, I know I’m not.”
We never talked about my mom becauseheremembered. He held those memories alone, and I couldn’t talk to him about the way she used to be when she was healthy and good and alive. I didn’t remember. But her shadow ... it was everywhere.
I’d told myself her story so many times that it inked a blueprint in my brain, one that I followed dutifully. It was a cautionary tale. A mapwith giant red X’s to avoid. And I’d sidestepped all of them, a decade-long effort to keep Pops from any more heartbreak. To make sure Gavin knew that there was nothing more important than him.
But I’d never pulled my perspective into a different direction. I’d never thought about what it might look like to the man who’d raised me. How he viewed all these choices, the safety net I stitched together day by day, month by month, year by year.
The ache I felt for Gavin and what he was missing, it was the ache Pops felt for me.
“You give up everything for everyone else,” he said, his voice cracking on the tears that flowed more freely now. “For me and Gavin, and your friends. For the shelter. God, Remi, you took a job that most wouldn’t, because it’s such hard work and it never ends, and I don’t think you’ve ever even stopped to ask yourself why. You have built your entire life, brick by brick by brick, to be the exact opposite of her. And that selflessness is ingrained in you, Remi. It’s not faked and it’s not forced. But sometimes I wonder if you hold on to it so tightly because the thing you’re really afraid of is turning out like her.”
It was the emotional equivalent of someone dropping an atomic bomb on my chest. The plume went sky-high, blotting out everything else in my field of vision. And the fallout ... the fallout was pure devastation.
I dropped my head to my knees and wept so hard that my frame shook. Pops slid an arm around my shoulders and cried with me.
We cried for the little girl who was scared and confused and didn’t understand what was happening. For the parents who had to bury their daughter because she was sick and nothing they did made her want to get better. For the man who lost his wife to that heartbreak too.
Destructive choices by someone helpless against this addictive thing running their life.
Wewere the fallout. And I would never let Gavin feel that way. Not for a second.