Chapter Thirty-Three
THERE WAS A LETTER.
Maximo had carried it, sealed, for two years, moving it from drawer to drawer the way you move a thing you can't throw away and can't bear to face.
Mary had written it in the loopy careless hand she never grew out of, and left it where he'd be sure to find it because she was the kind of girl who planned for a dramatic exit she never once truly believed would come.
Across the front she'd put three words that had kept him from opening it every single day since.
Max. Just in case.
Just in case. She'd written it light, like a joke, and he still hadn't read it because reading it meant she was really gone, and the sealed envelope was the last place on earth she was still a little bit alive.
She hadn't been his by blood. His father had married her mother the year Maximo turned twenty-four, a grown man with his own company and no use for a family, and a gap-toothed nine-year-old with a crooked-star necklace and no fear of him whatsoever had walked into his life and decided, without consulting him, that he was hers to boss.
He let her. He spent every year since being exactly the brother she'd drafted him to be, the way you become the thing someone that certain has already decided you are.
Not one drop of shared blood between them, and she'd been more his family than anyone who could claim it.
That was the part nobody who reached for the word stepsister ever understood.
He had chosen her. Of every person alive, she was the one he'd picked to keep.
Which was the whole trouble, in the end. Because somewhere along the way she had picked him back, and not the way a sister was supposed to.
He opened the letter that night, on the floor of the room he could no longer stand to be in and couldn't make himself leave.
Max. If you're reading this, then I've gone and done something permanent and dramatic, and knowing you, you're sitting somewhere with the lights off deciding it's all your fault. So first thing: sit up. Your face is doing the frown. Stop it.
He almost laughed. It came out as something else, something that scraped on the way up and didn't make it all the way to sound.
Here's what I need you to know because you never let me say it out loud and you're a captive audience now.
I love you. I have for the longest time, and not the way a little sister is supposed to, and I finally got tired of carrying it, so I'm going to tell you.
And if you're reading this, then it probably went the way I was afraid it would.
You turned me down, gentle as anything because you're you.
And then something happened to me, and now you've decided the whole thing has your name on it.
It doesn't. Do you hear me? It doesn't.
You didn't do a single thing wrong by not loving me back.
Nobody gets to choose who they love, not even you, and you tried to let me down like I was made of glass.
Loving me back was never the deal. You showing up to everything, scaring off everyone who deserved it, being the best big brother a girl ever bullied into buying her a terrible cake.
That was the deal, and you kept it every single day of my life.
I love you. Always did. Always will. And that stays true even though you're not in love with me.
You'll always be my favorite brother in the whole world.
Never mind that you happen to be my only one.
Now the part you're really going to hate.
Don't build me a museum, Max. Don't lock my door and dust my things and turn me into a rule you live by.
And whatever you do, if they use anything of mine, if some stranger out there ends up with a piece of me keeping them alive, don't go find them.
And if you go find them anyway because you're you, then don't you dare try to make them into me.
Because here's the truth, big brother, and I need you to really hear it: my heart won't be mine anymore. It'll belong to the one who lives.
Let it. Let them live. Promise me you'll let them have a whole loud life, and you'll go have one too.
Smile. Your face won't crack. I checked.
Love, M.
Maximo sat very still with the page in both hands, on the floor of the museum his sister had begged him not to build.
She had forgiven him before he'd ever had the chance to earn it.
For the gentle no in the front hall, for the door she slammed and the car she should never have been driving in the rain that upset, for the phone call that cut his life in half on an ordinary afternoon.
Two years of a verdict she had reached up out of the ground to try to overturn, and he had never once opened the envelope that would have done it.
And then he had gone looking for the one who lived, the exact thing she'd told him not to do, and he'd found her, and she'd turned out to be loud and alive and impossible not to love.
And when a second girl held her whole heart out to him, the very same heart, he had done the cruelest thing in reach because he was too much of a coward to survive being loved by a girl again.
He had tried to hand Jassy back the dead. And when she wouldn't take them, when all she'd done was live, exactly as instructed, he had punished her for it. In Mary's name. With Mary's own heart beating scared and sorry in her chest.
He folded the letter along its two-year creases, and he understood that his sister had known him better dead than he had ever managed to know himself alive.