CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The words hang between us in the hallway, "the last person in this whole story who didn't already know how it ends," and I watch them land on Thane like something physical, his jaw tightening, his hands curling briefly into fists at his sides before he forces them open again.
"That's not fair, and you know it." Thane pushes off the wall, all the careful stillness he's carried through this entire ordeal finally cracking under the weight of my accusation.
"I wasn't hiding it from you to hurt you, Niamh.
I told your father because I couldn't carry it alone anymore, and telling you felt impossible at the time, you were three hours away and hadn't spoken to me in two years. "
"So you decided for me." My voice stays low, controlled, the same dangerous quiet I've used my whole life to keep from screaming in hospital hallways.
"You decided I didn't need to know that the one person I was most afraid of losing had already forgiven me for something I've spent three years believing was unforgivable.
Do you understand what that would have meant to me, Thane?
A single phone call. One sentence. Instead I've spent an entire extra year carrying weight I didn't have to carry, because you decided that was your secret to manage instead of mine to know. "
"I know." He drags a hand through his hair, frustration and guilt tangled together in the gesture.
"I know that now, hearing you say it. At the time it felt like the only decent thing I could do, confess to your father because he deserved that truth from me directly, and then leave you alone because I didn't think I had the right to reopen a wound you'd clearly worked hard to close. I was trying to protect you."
"You keep saying that. Protecting me." Something bitter creeps into my voice despite my effort to keep it level.
"That's exactly the problem. You decided, alone, what I could handle, the same way I decided, alone, that leaving was the only way to keep everyone safe from what I'd done.
We've been doing the same thing to each other this whole time, Thane, just from opposite directions, and I don't know how either of us is supposed to trust that the other one's actually capable of doing anything differently. "
He goes very still at that, something in his expression shifting from defensive to genuinely stricken, like the parallel has landed somewhere he wasn't braced for.
"You're right." Quiet, unguarded in a way that would have disarmed me an hour ago and now just sits heavy between us, too little, arriving too late to undo the last hour.
"That's exactly what I did. I told myself it was different because I was protecting you instead of protecting myself, but I don't actually know if that's true.
Maybe I just didn't want to have the conversation where you found out I'd been carrying that secret around for two years before I finally cracked and told your father instead of you. "
"Why him and not me." The question comes out smaller than I mean it to, the anger finally cracking to reveal the hurt underneath it. "In two years, Thane, you never once picked up a phone."
"Because I was afraid you'd hang up on me the second you heard my voice, and I wasn't sure I'd survive that.
" His voice roughens, the admission costing him visibly.
"Your father was safer. He couldn't cut me out of his life the way you already had.
I told myself I was doing the honorable thing, confessing to the man whose best friend died because of what we did, and maybe some part of that's even true.
But if I'm being honest with you the way I should have been a year ago, I think I was also just a coward who couldn't face calling you. "
The hallway falls quiet around us, the distant beep of monitors and the hush of the overnight shift the only sound filling the space where neither of us has anything left to say that won't just repeat what's already been said.
I feel the fight draining out of me, replaced by something heavier, more exhausted, the specific grief of realizing that even the man who finally told me the truth about wanting me has still, in his own way, been managing me instead of trusting me with the whole picture.
A nurse passes us with a quiet, apologetic glance, the kind reserved for families who've forgotten they're standing in a public hallway, and the small, ordinary intrusion of it is almost a relief, a reminder that the world outside this argument is still turning, still full of other people's crises that have nothing to do with either of us.
"I need space," I say finally, the words costing me more than the anger did. "Not forever. Just. Tonight. I can't stand in this hallway and figure out what to do with all of this at three in the morning, not after everything else tonight already asked of me."
"Okay." He doesn't argue, doesn't reach for me, just nods, something resigned and sad settling into his face. "Whatever you need."
"I mean it, Thane. I need you to actually let me have it. Not follow me out to the garage bay in an hour because you couldn't sleep either."
"I won't." His voice cracks slightly on the promise, and I watch him make himself keep still, keep the distance, honoring exactly what I've asked for even though every line of him looks like it's costing him something enormous to do it.
"For what it's worth, I am sorry. Not just for the timing of tonight.
For the whole year I spent deciding you couldn't handle a truth that was always yours to have. "
I don't answer that, not because I don't believe him, but because I don't trust myself to accept an apology right now without it becoming something I use to skip past the part where I actually sit with how much this has cost me.
Some hurts need to be felt all the way through before they can be forgiven honestly, and I'm not willing to shortcut that just because it would be easier for both of us tonight.
I walk away from him down that hallway, past the nurses' station, past the vending machines that have become such a strange, specific landmark of this entire week, and out into the parking lot where the sleet has finally turned into something closer to snow, fat, slow flakes drifting down under the sodium lights.
I don't drive back to the clubhouse. I sit in my car instead, engine off, watching the snow accumulate slowly on the windshield, and I let myself feel the full weight of the night for the first time since the phone rang at three in the morning.
My father, stable but fragile. The truth he's carried for a year without telling me.
Thane, finally honest and somehow still not honest enough, soon enough, in the way that actually would have spared me a year of unnecessary guilt.
I think about my mother's cross, tarnished at the clasp, still around my neck under my jacket.
I think about the drawer in my apartment three hours away, the folded cut, the road captain's patch I stole and never confessed to stealing.
I think about how much of my life has been built around carrying things alone, deciding for myself what other people could and couldn't handle knowing, and how exhausting it suddenly feels to recognize that same pattern staring back at me from someone I love.
Somewhere in the middle of all that thinking, a harder, more uncomfortable truth surfaces, one I don't particularly want to look at directly but can't quite avoid anymore either.
I've spent this entire week being angry at Thane for deciding what I could handle without asking me, and I did the exact same thing to him three years ago, packed a bag, left a four sentence note, and drove away without ever once asking whether he might have wanted the chance to grieve Everhart together instead of alone.
I didn't trust him with my guilt any more than he trusted me with his confession.
We've both spent three years protecting each other from truths we should have simply shared, and I don't know yet whether recognizing that pattern is enough to actually break it, or whether some patterns just keep repeating no matter how clearly you can see them.
I don't cry. I'm too tired for that, the specific, hollowed out exhaustion that follows adrenaline once it's finally burned all the way through.
I just sit there in the cold, watching snow gather on the glass, until the first grey hint of dawn starts to lighten the sky over the hospital parking lot, and I still don't have anywhere I particularly want to go.