58. Claire
fifty-eight
While Nathan isout of the room—by the sounds of it, making tea—I scroll through my phone, and piece together all of the holes in the story.
While I had thought putting my phone on Do Not Disturb was the responsible thing to do, it actually sent everyone into a panic.
I have twelve missed calls from Nathan. After I hear the absolute panic in his first voicemail, I can’t bring myself to listen to the rest.
I do scan over the texts.
Penelope’s begin innocently enough—Okay! Be safe! Roads aren’t too bad now, but please drive slowly—to a stream of panic from every person in my current circle.
Penelope
Claire. Take your damn phone off DND.
Lucy
Hey, is everything okay? Harding just called me? He wanted to know where you are?
Juliet
Checking in. Nate just called Sam panicking about where you are. Is everything okay?
Aaron
Hey, so, Harding is freaking out. I want to say I called it, but also, he kinda sounded mad panicked.
I put everyone into a group chat for efficiency’s sake.
Claire
Hey everyone. I’m safe. I had my phone on DND driving home from the basketball game because of the snow, and Nathan couldn’t reach me. Sorry for the panic.
Aaron
Soooo, you and Harding???
He adds three eyes emojis to the thread, and I reply with a simple, Penelope can fill you in. Have at it. I’m going to go talk with Nathan now, and put my phone on silent. I am fully expecting over a hundred texts when I return to my phone later, but later can wait.
The look on Nathan’s face carves a crater in the pit of my stomach. He looks grave. Ashen, where I’m so used to rose-tinted cheeks when he’s around me. His eyes are wide, but his lips are a thin, sullen line. For a moment, I wonder if he’s about to throw up. He’s clutching the life out of the two tea mugs, so I extend my hands to take mine—the blue ceramic mug that I always use. If he can be thoughtful enough to still use my mug, he can’t be that angry, can he?
“Thank you,” I say. The words feel chalky in my throat.
He nods, humming in acknowledgement, as he sits on the couch, and runs a hand through his hair.
He hasn’t even changed out of his work attire. His snow boots are rucked up around a pair of black slacks, and I can tell where the sweat stains are forming beneath the arms of his light blue oxford. The tie is still cinched around his neck, and with the red hue of his skin that has risen above the collar, I can’t help but lean forward and loosen it.
Why does he flinch?
My eyes pinch, taking in the way his close. It looks like he’s holding his breath, and suddenly, I’m panicking. After his tie is fully undone, I kneel on the couch, cup his face, and turn him toward me. The sound that comes out, like a wounded animal, makes everything worse.
“Nathan,” I plead. “Baby, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
He’s panicking. His breaths stutter, but he reaches for me, clutching my forearms to ground himself. My thumbs brush over his eyes as I beg him to open them. When he does, he exhales. A long, warm stream of his breath shifts between us.
“I thought I lost you.”
His words are a hammer to the nail in the center of my heart. Crackling lines spider in all directions as he grips me tighter.
“I didn’t know where you were. You weren’t answering any of my calls. The snow was coming down so hard, Claire, I…”
The last time he was this vulnerable, he’d been in my arms, telling me all about his brother’s cancer diagnosis, afraid to lose him. About how his mom had been their biggest cheerleader, his biggest support. And then it hits me.
His parents died in a car accident in the middle of a snow storm.
“I thought I was doing the right thing.” It comes out like I’m speaking through a straw. “I put my phone on silent because you always said you didn’t like driving distracted, and I thought I would make you so proud, because the snow was coming down and…”
I sob. My body folds, crumples against him, and the moment he clutches me to hold me against him, I believe that everything will be okay.
“Nathan, I’m okay—I’m right here, I’m fine, I promise.”
My hands frantically roam, doing my best to bring life back into his cold unresponsiveness. I don’t expect his next words.
His, “My fault. My fault,” is mechanically distraught.
He grips onto me, but his head falls, his gaze landing between his spread legs.
“My parents…” He clears his throat, and continues looking toward the floor where his hands are clasped. “My parents died in a car accident. It was the beginning of a nor’easter. The roads were slick and dangerous. But they were out on that road because I asked them to be.”
The foundation beneath his words crumbles as I clutch the already fractured pieces of my swollen heart.
“My mom had always encouraged me to be a normal kid and live a normal life in spite of the years I spent saving my brother. So my senior year, I joined the chess team. We made it to the state tournament. I wanted them to be there. Wanted them to see me succeed. Wanted them to put me before Cal, for once in my life. I was so selfish, Claire. I begged them, even though the school hosting was even considering postponing the event. I begged them to go. They saw me win. And then, I never saw them again.”
“Nathan…” I reach to him, my eyes and my words laced with watery emotion, but he doesn’t take my hand. Instead, he tilts his head to me, and I see the most grim, sad, tortured look I’ve ever seen a human wear before.
I wonder if I’ve ever truly known Nathan Harding this whole time.
“It was my fault, Claire. My fault that my parents died that night. My fault that my Cal had to be raised by me—an unfit, older brother. He beat cancer, and then I took his mom and dad from him. I told my parents I wanted them to be proud of me for something. That they had encouraged me to ‘be normal,’ and I wanted them to see me doing it. Do you know what my dad said?”
His shoulders hitch up. He laughs humorlessly, tears streaming down his face in a steady free-fall.
“He said, ‘You’ve already made us proud, Nathan. You gave us your brother back. You’ve always done right by him.’”
His eyes close, and he exhales, preparing the rest of the story that he’s kept hidden.
“The moment the cancer was gone, they had to start walking this tightrope—it was strung between Cal and me, and they didn’t want it to tip too far one way or the other. They were entirely overbearing when it came to his medical status, and kissed Cal’s feet at every turn. He could do no wrong. But they walked on eggshells around me, like they didn’t know what to do after I’d sacrificed parts of myself for Cal. When Cal had the gift of life in remission, it was as if they looked at me and said, ‘You saved your brother, and now we don’t know what comes next for you.’ I saved his life, and thought I had lost my parents in the process. In the end, my selfishness really did cost them.”
His feelings air out in thick clouds around the room, and I don’t even know where to start. His body is curved in a defeated hunch. He looks so vulnerable right now. Spilling the rest of what’s been stacked on his heart, on the tail of thinking he’d replayed what happened with his parents all over again tonight when I didn’t picked up my phone?
I know I didn’t do anything intentionally, but I am racked with guilt. He looks like a wounded animal, so I don’t reach out to touch him, at fear of driving him away, even though my soul is splitting from my body to comfort his.
“Nathan, I’m so sorry.” It’s a good start. I’m sorry for a lot of things: Not anticipating that him not being able to contact me would worry him as much as it did. The weight of secrets he’s been holding onto about his parents and his brother. The fact that he’s been carrying it alone all this time.
“You couldn’t have known,” he whispers.
“I could have texted,” I insist. “I wanted to surprise you.”
The pinch in my voice sounds desperate, and I do my best to reign in my tears.
“I wanted to come over tonight and talk about things. We’ve been so off since Christmas, and I thought…”
That conversation, the What are we? talk I’d wanted to have tonight, seems so minuscule compared to all of this. It explains everything—why he’s been so protective. Why he hasn’t defined what we are, because the last time he had anything to call his own, it had all been torn from his grasp.
“If you had been hurt tonight…” A predatory growl wraps around the vulnerability of his words in the most eerie tone I’ve ever heard. “…I wouldn’t have been able to livewith myself, Claire.”
A chill races up my spine, freezing me to the spot as he slowly lifts his head, adrenaline coursing through him.
“That would have been my fault. My fault that something had happened to you. I can’t have your peril on my hands, Claire. I can’t.”
I’m getting whiplash from the intensity of his words in the deeply exposed tone they’re wrapped in. My head is spinning.
“What happened to my parents was my fault. It forced my brother to grow up without his mom and dad. I have given everything in me to be the parent he deserves. To make sure he gets to have everything he deserves in this life.”
“But you deserve it too,” I insist, finally reaching my hand out to cover his. To let him know that he has me as an anchor. “You deserve to live your life too, Nathan. Free from the guilt that’s been shackling you.”
I think back to the words he once spoke to me and try to mirror them as best I can.
“Cal is your brother. He is not your obligation. No matter what you try to tell yourself, you have a life worth living too, and if he knew that you were sacrificing everything so that he never had to see those bad things ever again? Nathan, he would tell you the same thing.”
His breath stutters, like he’s holding in a sob, like his chest is cracking and he’s doing his best to hold it together. I place one hand over his heart and the other on his cheek, forcing him to turn to me. The distress in his eyes, in the parting of his lips, almost breaks me.
“What happened to your parents is not your fault. Life works in mysterious ways sometimes, but it does not work to punish you. They didn’t die so that your dreams could die with them, Nathan. Your brother didn’t live so that you had to sacrifice any substance for his own. Life gave you both a second chance, and you deserve to take it.”
I straddle his thigh, pressing my knee between his legs so that he has no choice but to look at me.
“You have spent your whole life living in guilt, living for others. It’s your turn, Nathan. Take something for yourself.”
I want to say take this, us, for yourself, but it’s not the time. His shaky inhale has me holding onto him tighter.
“They’d still be here if it wasn’t for me,” he whispers.
I shake my head. “That’s not true.”
“Cal would have been raised by his parents, and not some older brother. He spent his childhood in the hospital and came out of it without his mom and dad.”
“You can’t think like that anymore.”
“I deserve this.” He breathes in deep, his voice shuddering as his pained gaze finds mine. “I deserve to spend my time in a job I hate so that my brother can have this last thread to the parents I ripped away from him.”
A sob causes his words to tremble, and more missing pieces click into place. I shift my position ever so slightly and gaze around the place that has become my sanctuary.
This isn’t his home. It’s his parents’. And he has been…
“That’s why you took the job.”
He nods, his head heavy.
“To keep the house?”
“Not for much longer.” He laughs humorlessly. “Even with the pay bump, the taxes are going to be too much. I should just use my inheritance. I don’t deserve it. And I don’t deserve you.”
The change in direction gives me whiplash so hard, I swear my heart stops.
“What?” It comes out as a wheeze.
He swallows, cupping my waist and squeezing so hard, I hope the shape of his hand stays behind when he lets go.
“You deserve a life unencumbered by the weight of my guilt and decisions.” He shakes his head, lips parting and closing three times before he says, “You should be with someone like Connor. Someone your own age. Someone who can still give you a life that fulfills you.”
“What?” I exclaim, sitting up in his lap. “Nathan, what are you talking about? Where is this coming from?”
His eyes flood with fresh tears, and for the first time, I feel him slipping through my fingers.
“We’re living in secret, Claire. I can’t give you the life you deserve to have. You should be out with your friends, working through your internship, starting your career. I am shackled here, paying off my lifetime of debts. I can’t give you everything that you deserve. You could’ve been hurt tonight because of me. I certainly don’t deserve all that you’ve given me.”
“Stop,” I exclaim, clasping his hands that have been running up and down my waist to ground himself, and squeezing them between us. “Nathan, you do deserve this. Us. Don’t you see how far we’ve both come?”
He starts to shake his head, and I reverse the move he’s used on me since the beginning to get me out of my own. I clasp his jaw between my thumb and forefinger and force his gaze to see the candor in mine.
“I wouldn’t have made it this far if it wasn’t for you. I wouldn’t have been able to break free of my past—the guilt I harbored about my siblings, the guilt I had for wanting to live my own life—if it wasn’t for you. And I don’t want any of that to be in vain. I want to live in this freedom with you.”
I kiss him. Hard. Demanding that if my words won’t break through to him, maybe the way our bodies have always fit together so perfectly will. He doesn’t respond right away, and I take my time, tilting my mouth against his, holding him securely in my hands as he’s always done for me, until he finally sighs, melts into me, and works his lips beneath mine. I gasp in relief, slipping my tongue against his as his hands come up around my back, holding onto me like the world is ending.
When I wake up in his bed the next morning to find the house empty, I wonder if mine just did.