Chapter 55
Katie
December, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
In the hospital’s waiting room, it was only Tyler and me. There was a butterfly bandage on his face, just below his right
eye, but otherwise, whiplash. Otherwise, he was fine.
He sat across from me, unspeaking, eyes down. There were Christmas lights flickering on a small fake tree and years-old magazines
nobody wanted to read stacked in too-tidy piles on too-shiny end tables. My parents were somewhere inside. Ingrid’s too. Her
mother was a doctor here, and they were all corralled behind those sterile and swinging double doors, being grown-ups, doing
grown-up things.
“Were you high?” I whispered.
His head was in his hands. He did not answer.
“Tyler,” I whispered again.
“We both were . . . we always were . . . It was just weed . . . I didn’t think . . .”
When he finally glanced up, when I finally saw him for what he was, I couldn’t breathe.
And neither, I think, could he.