Chapter Thirty-Seven
"DON'T," I TELL HIM, before he can start. "If you're about to explain it away, don't. I'd rather stand here in the rain."
"I'm not going to explain it." Water runs off his jaw. He doesn't wipe it. "There's no version of what I said to you that has an excuse under it. I looked for one for a year. There isn't one."
I wasn't ready for that. I'd braced for the smooth thing, the powerful-man thing, the reasons all lined up in a row. Not a man standing in a storm agreeing with the worst thing I've ever thought about myself.
"Then why," I ask, and my voice cracks right down the middle of the word. "You don't get to wreck me and then just stand in the rain looking sorry, Maximo. Tell me why."
"Because I was a coward." He says it plainly, the way you read a verdict off a page you've already read a hundred times.
"Because when Mary died I built a room out of rules and I moved into it, and it was safe in there, and it was killing me by inches, and I liked it.
Then you walked into a diner and started inventing rules of your own, and you dragged me out of that room without even knowing the room was there, and I couldn't forgive you for it. "
"For being alive," I whisper.
"For making me want to be."
And that's the thing I can't hold in one more second, the question that's been eating a hole clean through me for a year, so I let it out right there in the storm.
"I don't understand." I hate how young it comes out, how small.
"I spent this whole year sure I'd finally worked it out.
That she was never really your sister at all.
That she was the one you loved, the one you lost, and I had the nerve to walk in wearing her actual heart and fall for you anyway.
That every day I stayed I was some cheap stand-in for a dead woman you'd never stop loving, living on her heart, reaching for her man.
And you let me. So tell me the truth, whatever it is.
The version I built for myself nearly finished me. "
Something goes through him, and I watch it cost him to hold my eyes.
"You had it backwards. All of it, and that part's on me too.
" He crosses the last of the distance he swore he'd never cross, careful, like I'm something that might still run.
"She wasn't the girl I loved, Jassy. She was my sister.
Not by blood. My father married her mother the year I turned twenty-four, and a nine-year-old with a crooked-star necklace walked in and appointed me her brother before I got a vote.
But that is all she ever was to me, in every way that counts.
A sister. I loved her like one and only ever like one. "
The rain comes down between us and I can't make a single sound.
"She loved me the other way." He says it like it still guts him.
"She was nineteen. She stood in my front hall and told me she'd been in love with me for years, and I turned her down.
As gently as I had it in me to do, which wasn't nearly gentle enough because there is no kind way to be handed a girl's whole heart and give it back.
She ran. It was raining. She got into a car she was in no state to drive—"
He stops. He doesn't finish. He doesn't have to.
"The accident," I breathe.
"The accident." His jaw works around it.
"They kept her heart beating long enough to ask me one question, and I said yes because it was the last thing left that she would have wanted.
A stranger I'd never met got the rest of her life.
I got two years on the floor of a locked room.
" His eyes don't leave mine. "A girl loved me, Jassy.
I couldn't love her back. And it killed her. That is the man you've been grieving."
And there it is. Not a rival. Not a dead great love I could never hope to match.
A wound shaped exactly like me.
"And then you," he says, low and wrecked, "walked into a diner two years later with her heart in your chest and started loving me the exact way she did, loud and all in and asking for nothing back, and I lost my mind.
I wasn't keeping the truth from you to protect Mary.
I was keeping you at arm's length to protect you from me.
From being one more girl who made the mistake of loving me and paid for it.
I would rather you hated me alive than loved me into the ground. "
"She wrote me a letter." His voice is the one that breaks now, the most guarded voice I've ever known coming apart at the bottom.
"I finally read it, two years too late. She'd already forgiven me for it, all of it, the no and the rain and the rest, before it ever happened because she knew me better than I have ever known myself.
She told me not to build her a museum. She told me that if a stranger ever ended up with her heart, I was to let them live.
Let them have a whole loud life." He laughs, wet and wrecked, nothing like a laugh.
"She'd have loved you on sight. She'd have taken one look at you and known you were exactly the one who was supposed to get it.
The only thing I've done right in two years is fall in love with the girl my sister would have picked for it herself. "
I'm crying openly now. He isn't. Men like him don't. But his throat works around something that won't go down, and his hands are fists at his sides, everything in him clamped shut to keep from coming apart in front of me, and the rain does the weeping for both of us, the way it's apparently been doing all along.
"That's not an apology," I manage. "That's just...true things, said too late, in a storm."
"I know." He holds my eyes and doesn't blink the water out of them.
"The apology is the rest of my life. If you'll let me spend it.
I'm not asking you to forgive me tonight.
I wouldn't believe you if you did. I'm asking you to let me stand right here tomorrow.
And the night after. And the one after that, until you believe me. "