16. Gideon
Gideon
My phone buzzed somewhere under the couch cushion. I ignored it.
Ryan was stretched out against me, feet tucked under him, scrolling through makeup videos while I pretended to watch the end of some home renovation show I’d put on.
I had no idea what happened to the house.
There was a wall, then there wasn’t a wall, and someone cried over a kitchen island.
Apparently, this was entertainment. I was having a better time playing with Ryan’s hair and inhaling the scent of him.
My phone buzzed again.
“Your friends are fighting,” Ryan said.
“They’re always fighting. And they’re our friends.”
He smiled as he glanced over. “What are they fighting about?”
“Bob decided a hot dog isn’t a sandwich.”
The argument had been going on for three days in the art group chat.
Arnaud produced diagrams. Bob called the diagrams propaganda.
Walker changed the group name to THIS IS NOT A FUCKING FOOD CHAT, and Arnaud changed it back within minutes.
Chip made the mistake of mentioning tacos. That opened an entirely new front.
My phone buzzed a third time.
“See?” I said with a huff. “They’re still going.”
Ryan laughed and went back to his phone. I didn’t check mine, not then, and that was the part I kept coming back to afterward. Three buzzes and I hadn’t even looked.
We finished the show, and Ryan went upstairs first, since his nighttime routine apparently involved enough products to stock a small pharmacy while mine involved brushing my teeth and hoping for the best. I turned off the television, checked the doors, carried two empty glasses into the kitchen, and stood there a moment looking at the life I’d somehow started building without noticing.
Ryan’s jacket hung over the back of a chair, his shoes sat by the door next to mine, and there was glitter dusted across the bathroom counter that I’d stopped bothering to wipe away.
He hadn’t officially moved in, but every new trace of him I found made my heart a little happier than I was ready to admit.
“Are you coming?” he called from upstairs.
“Yeah.” I grabbed my phone off the couch. Twenty-three messages in the group chat, of course, and I swiped them away without reading a single one then stopped at the notification underneath.
NOAH
For a second, I only stared at my brother’s name.
Noah didn’t text me. I texted him every so often over the years: birthdays, Christmas, Ethan’s anniversary, and the occasional “saw this and thought of you” when something stupid reminded me of being kids.
Sometimes I’d get the little notification telling me he’d read it, mostly not even that.
He never answered. I never expected him to.
I didn’t think I deserved one, not really.
I was the one who’d let our brother die. Of course he hated me.
My thumb felt numb when I opened the message.
Noah: I’m sorry, Gid. I can’t keep doing this. Tell Dad I love him.
I read it again, then again, cold sliding through my chest. Noah hadn’t called me Gid since we were kids. Ethan had been Gids, sometimes Giddy when he wanted to piss me off, but Noah had always shortened it differently.
Gid.
I was already calling Noah. It rang once, twice, three times. “Come on.”
A fourth ring, then voicemail.
“Noah, call me. Call me right fucking now.” My voice sounded wrong.
I hung up and called again. Nothing.
Ryan came downstairs. “What’s happened?”
“I don’t know.”
I showed him the message, and he paled.
I called Dad. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding half-asleep. “Gideon?”
“Dad, where’s Noah?”
Silence. “What?”
“Where’s Noah?”
“I don’t know. Home, I suppose. Why?”
“He sent me a message.”
“What message?”
I couldn’t seem to get enough air. “He said he was sorry.”
Dad was suddenly awake. “When?”
“I don’t know. Twenty minutes ago, maybe thirty. I didn’t fucking look.”
Ryan took the phone from my shaking hand long enough to put it on speaker.
“I’m going over there,” Dad said.
“I’m coming.”
“You’re hours away.” He was right. Six if we went through Canada, eight if we went south of Lake Erie, but either way, I was coming. I knew I needed to be there.
“I’m not losing another brother,” I said, but Dad had already dropped the call.
I stared at the phone. Ryan touched my arm. “I should’ve checked my messages earlier.”
“You didn’t know.”
“He doesn’t message me. He never fucking messages me.”
“I know.”
“I should’ve checked.”
Ryan didn’t argue with me again and pointed at the pile of coats, shoes, keys, protein bars, and bottles of water.
He stayed while I called Noah six more times, pacing from the kitchen to the living room and back.
I opened the message over and over until the words stopped looking like English.
I’m sorry, Gid. I can’t keep doing this.
Tell Dad I love him. At some point, he took the phone out of my hand because I couldn’t hold it steady anymore.
Then it rang. Dad.
I grabbed it. “Is he okay?”
There was noise behind him, voices, a door, something metallic hitting something else.
“Dad?”
“He’s alive.”
My knees went. Ryan caught me before I hit the floor. “What happened?”
“He’s… alive,” Dad said again, and his voice broke on the second word.
“What happened?”
“I found him.”
“Found him how?”
Dad took a breath. “Noah… a knife… tried… to kill himself.”
Everything stopped: the room, Ryan, me, all of it.
“No.”
“Paramedics are here. He’s alive. They’re taking him to Sparrow.”
“No.”
“Gideon.”
“No.”
I couldn’t get another word out. My brother tried to kill himself. Noah, who spent ten years angry with me. Noah, who wouldn’t answer my calls, who looked straight through me at family gatherings until I’d stopped going, and who spent years asking why I couldn’t save our brother. “I’m coming home.”
“Gideon—”
“I’m coming home.”
Dad didn’t argue this time. “I’ll text you when I know more.”
I ended the call. Ryan was already kneeling in front of me. I didn’t remember getting onto the floor.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how long—”
“Gideon.”
I looked at him.
“I’m going with you.”
I nodded because I couldn’t work out how to do any of this alone.
Noah looked old. That was my first thought when I saw him, not hurt, not sick, old. He was thirty, five years older than me, far too young to look the way he did lying against white hospital pillows with his eyes closed and his face gray under the fluorescent lights.
Dad sat beside the bed. He’d changed since I’d last seen him too, or maybe I’d never really looked. His shoulders were rounded, his shirt creased, and there was dried blood on one cuff that I refused to think about.
He stood when I walked in, and for a second neither of us moved. Then Dad hugged me. My father hugged me, and I went rigid from pure shock before my arms came up around him. He held on. So did I.
“He’s going to be okay,” Dad whispered.
I looked over his shoulder at Noah. Physically, that was what everyone kept saying. Physically, he’d be okay. Nobody seemed willing to tell me what happened after that.
Ryan waited outside. He hadn’t even asked if I wanted him to come in, just squeezed my hand and told me he’d be right there. Dad let me go, and I went to the bed.
Noah’s arm lay on top of the blanket. There were marks on his skin, some new, some not, and the older ones stopped me cold. Thin, pale lines, more than one, more than five. The same as the ones on my own arms. He’d been lost to grief the same as me.
“I didn’t know.” Dad looked destroyed. “He’s such a good cop, so good at his job. He had friends. He was—” He couldn’t finish it.
I didn’t say that I’d held down a career too, had friends too, and none of it had stopped me from falling apart either.
That was somehow worse. We’d both been so busy surviving Ethan that we hadn’t seen Noah disappearing right in front of us.
Except I hadn’t even been looking. I’d spent ten years drowning in my own guilt, counting all the things I should’ve done differently, replaying that afternoon until every second had been worn smooth.
I should’ve stopped Ethan. I should’ve known the ice was too thin.
I should’ve made him go home. I should’ve saved him.
Me, me, me. I’d made grief into something so personal I’d never once stopped to wonder what it was doing to everyone else.
“I should’ve seen it,” I said.
Dad sat down heavily. “So should I.”
Noah moved, barely anything, a shift beneath the blanket, a crease between his eyebrows, and then his eyes opened. He saw Dad first, then me, and his face crumpled. He turned his head away.
“Noah.”
“Go home.” His voice was rough.
“No.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“Tough.”
Dad looked at me. I pulled the chair closer and sat. Noah still wouldn’t look at me. “I got your message.”
His eyes closed. “You weren’t supposed to see it until afterward.”
The words hit harder than anything else had. I gripped the edge of the chair. “Fuck you.”
Dad flinched. Noah didn’t.
“You don’t get to do that,” I said.
“Gideon.”
“No, Dad. He doesn’t get to send me that and then fucking die.”
Noah finally looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. I’d never seen Noah cry, not at Mom’s funeral, not at Ethan’s, not once in ten years. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it.”
His mouth twisted. “You don’t want that.”
“I fucking do.”
“No.”
“Ten years, Noah.” He looked away. “Ten fucking years you’ve hated me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
I laughed, and it came out ugly. “You’ve got a strange way of showing it.”
“I never hated you.”
“You kept asking me why I couldn’t save him.” Nothing. “Every time I saw you. Like I hadn’t already asked myself that a thousand times.”
“Because I’m a fucking coward!” His eyes squeezed shut. “Because it was easier.”
I stopped breathing. Dad leaned forward. “Noah?”
Noah covered his face with one hand. “It was easier if it was Gideon.”
I couldn’t move. “What was?”
Noah began to cry, not quietly. His whole face folded, his shoulders shaking under the thin hospital gown. Dad started to stand, but Noah shoved his hand out. “No.” Dad froze. Noah looked at me. “I dared him.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“Ethan. That morning…” The room disappeared. There was only Noah. “I dared him in the kitchen while you were still asleep. He deleted my Call of Duty profile. I was so fucking angry. I called him chicken shit.”
I couldn’t breathe as Noah wiped his face with his hand. “I kept at him. Told him he was a scared baby for not wanting to skate that morning. He got pissed off.”
“Noah.”
“He wasn’t supposed to go that far. He was supposed to skate out a few feet, prove he wasn’t scared, and come straight back. That’s all I said.” Dad made a broken sound. Noah kept talking. “I never thought he’d actually try for the point. I never thought I wouldn’t even be there to stop him.”
He didn’t just go a few feet. I’d looked over. He was already past the drop-off, skating for the point like it was nothing, laughing too loud, too pleased with himself.
“I yelled at him to come back,” I said, broken. “The ice went before I even got close.”
“Gid—”
I stood so fast the chair went over. “I went after him as far as I could before it started cracking under me too. Tyler dragged me back before I went through. By the time anyone reached him—”
I couldn’t finish it.
“I know,” Noah said, and it sounded like it cost him everything he had left.
“You weren’t there. You don’t get to say I know like you were there.”
“I know I wasn’t there.” His voice cracked. “That’s the whole point. I sent him out to prove something to me because I was pissed about a fucking game, and I wasn’t even there to stop it, and knowing the last thing he ever heard from me was chicken shit.”
“You kept asking me why I couldn’t save him.”
Noah sobbed. “I know.”
“You made me believe I killed him.”
“Because you were there and I wasn’t, and it was easier to let you carry it than to tell you what I’d done.”
Ten years. Ten fucking years. “I believed you.” That silenced him. I pressed both hands to my head like it might keep my skull from splitting open. “I believed you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Gid—”
“No.”
Those words again. I’m sorry, Gid. They still didn’t touch this. “You watched me fall apart.”
“I was falling apart too.”
“You made me carry it!” God, I was shouting at someone who almost died. What the fuck was wrong with me?
His face twisted. “I couldn’t carry it.” The anger drained out of me so fast it left me empty. Noah looked down at his scarred arm. “I couldn’t carry it,” he whispered again.
And there it was. Not an excuse, not forgiveness. The truth.
I’d walked away from that lake alive, but part of me had never really left it.
Noah had never even been there, but he hadn’t left it either, not really, not with ten years of a dare he could never take back.
I looked at the scars on Noah’s arm, then at Dad sitting between us with tears running unchecked down his face.
I thought about all the years we’d spent separated by blame.
Ethan had died. Mom was already gone. And instead of holding on to what was left of us, we’d torn each other apart.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know how to forgive Noah, and I didn’t know how to forgive myself, but for the first time in ten years I understood that maybe those were two different things.
I picked up the chair and sat back down. Noah watched me. “I’m still fucking furious with you.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know if I can forgive you.”
“I know.”
“But you’re not dying. Ever. Not before me.”
His mouth trembled, and I reached for his hand. For a second, he didn’t move, then his fingers closed around mine. Dad put his hand over both of ours, the big man openly crying.
Three of us. There should have been four, and there would always be someone missing. But three of us were still here, and that had to be enough.
God, I needed Ryan so bad right now.