Chapter 28
Somehow my mom and Cory move me off the floor to the couch. I’m dimly aware of Mom ordering everyone around, telling them to get a cold compress and a glass of ice water and Tylenol and the peppermint oil.
I hear Talia’s voice, Lou’s voice, my brothers’ voices. Snippets of their words penetrate the rush of my blood in my ears.
“How can we be sure? There had to be more than one young woman who died that day that donated her organs.” Cory’s low baritone.
“Should we take her to the hospital?” Talia’s strained whisper.
My body is racked with shivers, and my heart—Lyla’s heart—still races. I’m breathing too fast. I stare at the dark TV, but all I can see is Hunter’s face, the horrifying, world-ending truth dawning in his eyes, shattering through him, tearing him apart.
Tearing us apart.
And then everyone goes quiet when the front door opens. I know without looking that Hunter is back. But I don’t look at him. I can’t look at him.
“I’m sorry, Liv. I can’t . . . I can’t be here—this close to—” His voice is broken.
As broken as I am.
“I’m leaving. I wanted you to know. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Hunter, no! It’s not her fault—”
I hear the door open and shut again, silencing Lou’s protest.
Hunter is gone. And this time, I have no idea where he’s gone. I only know it’s not next door.
He doesn’t come back the rest of the night. I lie on the couch, alternating between panic attacks and silent sobs for hours. My mom wants to call the doctor or take me in to the hospital, but I refuse. I’m not sick. I’m not in heart failure.
My heart is breaking. But it’s not broken.
My brothers and Chris leave shortly after Hunter, the party clearly canceled.
Cameron and Cory want to stay, but it’s finals, and they have no choice but to leave.
Talia sits by my feet, rubbing them with gentle hands; my mom stays by my head, stroking my hair.
Lou alternates between hovering and disappearing for brief interludes—probably to try to call Hunter where I can’t overhear them.
Finally, when it’s almost eleven, I make myself sit up. I’m lightheaded and shaky and still have tears leaking out of my eyes. But I can’t force Hunter to go find a hotel somewhere or sleep in his car because he can’t bear to see me. Not when I have such an easy solution. “Take me home, Mom.”
“What?”
“I want to go home with you.” I look to my roommate, fresh tears welling in my eyes. “Lou, you can tell Hunter to come back. I’ll stay at Farmor’s house for . . . however long I need to. He’s been through enough. I can’t do this to him. And he needs you.”
“Liv, no. That’s not fair to you. I know this is . . .” Lou searches and fails to find a word. “I don’t know what this is. It’s incomprehensible. But he’ll get over it. It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
I shake my head, swiping at the tears on my cheeks with shaky hands. “It’s not fine. It will never be fine that I’m alive because his sister died. I’ll go.” I turn to my mom. “Will you help me pack my clothes and stuff?”
“Of course, sweetheart.” She brushes back the hair that sticks to my damp forehead, her touch as gentle as her voice.
“Please don’t go, Liv.” Lou sounds like she’s on the verge of tears now too. I can’t take it. I can’t take hurting anyone else.
“I have to. You know I do. At least for now.”
“She’s probably right,” Talia says quietly.
Lou turns away, her shoulders caving in.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
She has no idea how sorry I am. For everything.
It takes only about twenty minutes for my mom, Talia, and me to pack a bunch of my clothes, toiletries, medicines, shoes, and essential items into a couple of suitcases.
In that time, a strange numbness begins to replace the waves of panic and grief.
I welcome the respite from the onslaught of guilt and anxiety.
By the time I’m following them down the stairs, where Lou waits on the landing with swollen, red eyes, I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience.
It’s someone else hugging her roommate goodbye—for now.
Someone else who follows her mom to her car, putting half of her life in the trunk.
Someone else who stares out the window, feeling the beat of a stranger’s heart in her chest. Someone else who has to face the reality that she started to fall in love with the brother of the donor who saved her life.
Someone else who promised not to hurt Hunter the way everyone else had—and then ripped his life apart in the worst way possible.
When we get to Farmor’s house, where my mom has lived for the last eleven years, I somehow force my feet to walk through the door, up the stairs, into the bedroom where I also lived before I moved out with Lou.
I curl up on my side on top of my old bedspread, pulling my knees into my chest, and the bubble of numbness pops—as though someone took a needle to it, exploding the comfort out of my grasp, leaving me sobbing and gasping for air again.
Mom is there, sitting beside me within seconds, stroking my back and making soothing sounds, telling me it’s okay.
But it’s not okay. And it’s never going to be okay again.
It was awful enough when the family whose devastation filled me with guilt was faceless, nameless, unknown.
But to realize it’s Hunter? To know that his parents are so traumatized by Lyla’s death that his dad still lashes out at his only son after seven years? That his mom won’t even talk to him because of her death?
I don’t know how to ever recover from this.
We made the choice to jump, and I’ve already broken his heart two days later. Exactly like I feared I would, just not in the way I expected.
“I’m going to page the on-call doctor to see if I can give you anything to help you sleep,” my mom says, but I don’t even respond.
I don’t know how much time passes before she comes back with a tiny pill in her palm.
“Here,” she says. “He said you can take this. And I’ll get your other nighttime meds too.”
I obediently swallow all the pills she hands me with a cup of water. Then she sits beside me on the bed, gently stroking my hair.
“When your dad died, I thought I wanted to die with him,” my mom says suddenly.
Her words are so shocking I almost choke.
“That kind of grief . . . it doesn’t get better with time.
Everyone tells you it will—that the pain lessens over time—but that’s not true.
At least, not for me. What time did do was give me perspective.
And with that time, you grow stronger so you can handle the pain better. You find a way to live with it.
“Then one Mother’s Day, you gave me a card with twenty reasons why you loved me.
I realized that the hole your dad left will never close—but my heart was still full.
Full of love for you and your brothers. And losing him brought us here.
When your heart failed, we were ten minutes away from the best pediatric heart surgeons in the world.
I’ll never be grateful he’s gone—I wish every day he were here.
But I am grateful that because of his loss, we were in the right place to save you.
And somehow, in all that grief, there has been joy—unexpected, undeserved, beautiful joy.
With you three kids and with Farmor. Joy made sweeter because of the pain we had to go through to experience it. ”
She continues to smooth my hair back, her touch methodical and calming.
“What happened tonight—what you think happened seven years ago—it’s unbearable right now.
But in time, Hunter may see that while he’ll always grieve for his sister, her loss didn’t just take something from the world.
It gave him something too. Something bright and beautiful and rare.
Something he’d be foolish to let slip away. ”
I reach up and clutch her hand, willing myself to believe her, to give myself that ounce of hope. But it slips through my grasp. “I don’t know how he could ever look at it that way.”
“I hope he’s strong enough to. If he’s a man worthy of you, he will.”
My head starts to feel fuzzy. Whatever my mom gave me is taking effect. The sharpness of my pain slowly begins to dull. An unnatural but extremely welcome calm descends, like a blanket being wrapped over me, smothering my panic into submission.
“Sleep now, my love. The sun will rise tomorrow, and so will you. We’ll get through this. We always have, and we always will—together.”
I drift off with my mom’s scent and her words lulling me into a mercifully dreamless sleep.