Tropesick

Chapter 77

Katie

I woke up that morning to an empty bed. This was not unusual. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d reached out for Tyler

mid-dream only to find a cool pillow or salt air. But this was different. After the past forty-eight hours, this did not feel

right.

I fumbled for the nightstand, expecting a note—but no. Nothing. I scoured the main house, the library, the dock, and the beach.

No sign of him, or even of Meredith and Pinot. No evidence of toast burned or coffee brewed. No remnants of lobster ravioli

in the cat bowl.

I headed back to the terrace. I was being crazy, wasn’t I? Searching for evidence of something that would not happen. The

three of them were probably off somewhere, poring over Tyler’s finished manuscript, and I’d simply missed them by a minute.

Soon enough, they’d appear, and Tyler and I would make brunch.

I closed my eyes. I remembered his mouth on my mouth yesterday afternoon, my body glued to his in that bed, my life finally

making so much sense. The glow of a single lamp, the swirl of that cottage—brick and terra-cotta tile and everything else,

whitewashed and the safest place I’d ever known.

He was mine.

I was being crazy, and he was mine.

I walked back to the cottage, clinging to the memory. Clinging to every minute we’d shared in this place. Clinging to every taste and scent and sound.

I opened the door.

Tyler was sitting on the floor at the foot of his bed, his head in his hands. My entire body went slack.

“Katie,” he said.

I was trembling. “No. Don’t do this . . . Don’t do this, please.”

The thing about loving someone is that you don’t always get a say in who they are, what they do, or when they go. The heart

wants what it wants. I believed that, even in this moment, even though I could already see the next five, ten, fifteen minutes

play out like I’d scripted them myself.

“I think,” he said, “your mom is right.”

Something cold and metal clanked shut around my rib cage. Tyler’s head was still in his hands. Behind him, in that bed, were

still the ghosts of us, braiding our bodies under the covers.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Why are you doing this? We had a plan. What happened? What changed?”

He winced. It was a full-body wince. One that spread from what little I could see of his face all the way to his shins.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t take you away from them.”

“You’re not,” I said. “I love you. That’s not what’s happening. And it was my decision to make.”

He frowned again. That wince, multiplied by a thousand. I kept waiting for one of us to raise our voices, but there was a

calmness to the whole thing that made it infinitely more real. This was not a fight, but the nail in the coffin. This was

not a third-act breakup but the end of a love story. He knew exactly what he was doing.

I slumped against the closed door. We were six, maybe seven feet apart. It was perfect blocking, really. It was exactly how I would’ve drafted it. It was exactly how much space I would’ve given myself to fall apart.

“Why did you start this?” I said. My voice was still so low. “Why would you let me fall in love with you all over again? If

you knew you’d go?”

Tyler bent his body a little more. His face was pressed against his knees. He was in a pair of basketball shorts and that

old gray T-shirt I’d worn every night it was remotely clean for the past five weeks. “I thought I could do it,” he said. “I

thought I was ready to face what I’d done. But I can’t take another child away from them. Your mom, your dad, they raised

me.”

I frowned, and somehow, my hand began to rise. It was reaching out to touch him, wasn’t it? But it only floated an inch. After

all, I had my armor on.

“Last night,” he said, “I just sat there, watching you sleep.” He raised his head. His eyes were wet, and his face was swollen.

“You deserve better than this, Katie. You deserve someone who’s never hurt you. Who can help you repair what happened with

your parents, not the other way around.”

“What I want,” I said, “is you.”

Another flinch. This one, even the armor couldn’t refract. Dulled, sure, but it cracked between my ribs all the same.

“I already talked to Selma,” he said. “I’ll finish the book. I’ll handle everything.”

I nearly laughed.

And then, something strange happened. I rose to my feet.

“Stand the fuck up,” I said.

Tyler’s head jerked back. Heat rushed to my hands, my face.

“I said, stand up.”

He pushed himself off the tile. I cut the distance between us in half.

“I will not,” I said, “let you leave me again.”

His eyes softened, but his shoulders stiffened. He took two steps back. “It’s too late for us. Your family, they don’t deserve

this. They don’t deserve to—”

“You,” I said, “are such a fucking coward.”

“Katie, please. Listen to me. You are remarkable. You are gorgeous and funny and smart, and you are good. You will find someone

who can love you a thousand times better than I ever could. You will find somebody who isn’t broken, somebody who hasn’t broken

you, somebody who deserves you. You—”

“You think I don’t know that!? You think I don’t know that I could do better? That I deserve better? Do you think I want this?

To love you? To love the boy that has stomped on my heart since the day I was born? Who ignored me in the halls, then stared

into my window every night? Who ran his thumb along my bottom lip, then refused to kiss me? Who fucked every single girl in

our town except me? You think I wake up every morning and want this? Do you have any clue how humiliating it is to love someone

like you?”

Tyler threw his arms out wide. “Then why do you do it, Katie!? Why do you keep doing it? How could you ever love somebody

like me!?”

“I don’t know! Do you really think I haven’t tried to stop? It’s all I do! It’s all I’ve ever done! I can’t help it! I was

made for you! Why isn’t that enough for you!?”

For a moment, time stood still.

The birds stopped chirping.

The waves stopped crashing.

Everything that had ever happened and was ever going to happen stretched out between us. Every chapter and every scene was

right there, hovering. Suspended. Ours to salvage. Ours to let slip away. So much of a love story depends upon these moments—these

freeze-frames. So much of our lives comes down to a few pathetic plot points. To a few pivotal, predictable forks in the road.

“You know what I wanted, Tyler? For once in my life? I wanted you to show up for me. I have spent my whole life waiting for

you to show up for me, and you have let me down every single time. I needed you to put on a suit and love me in the real world.

I needed you, for one night, to act like a normal fucking person!”

“I know! You think I don’t know that? You think it hasn’t been killing me? All fucking summer!?”

“Obviously not! Because you never said a word about it! Because it’s been eight years! What on earth are you so afraid of?”

“Play this out, Katie! What planet are you living on? Your mother is not going to forgive me! So let me tell you what would’ve

happened if we’d shown up at her thing tonight, all right? We go, we leave this place, and suddenly, I’m seventeen again.

I’m the fucking guy who drove the car into the fucking mailbox, who shattered the once-in-a-generation arm of my best friend,

then decided to start fucking his little sister!”

My whole body jerked back. “Is that what you’re doing here? Fucking Mikey’s little sister? Trying to get your stupid book

published? Is that why you came here? To cross me off your bucket list? To sell your sad fucking book?”

“What? No. I didn’t mean—”

“But you did mean it! What did you think was going to happen when you started talking to me like that? Started looking at me like that? Started touching me like that? What did you think was going to happen when you took me to your sacred dumpling shop? Bought me a walkie-talkie? Cooked dinner with me every night? Fucked me like it was your first time? Woke me up at the crack of dawn and dragged me to Shelter Island so I could fall in love with you even more? What did you think was going to happen? Are you still that compulsive, that you never bothered to think any of this through? Did you really think you could just take and take and dump your trauma onto me, let me heal you, let me forgive you, let me change my mind about you, and then—once you’d finally gotten me out of your teenage system—expect me to cut you loose because you’re scared? Because you’re fucking scared?”

“Yes, Katie! I’m scared! And you should be too! Your mother hates me! Your mother, she . . .”

“She what, Tyler? She’s just a sad woman. She’s not God!”

A softness flashed across Tyler’s face. The kind of look that—nine years ago, when he came back to my window—had melted me

into mush. But this time, I saw right through it. This time, I was not a child.

“What the fuck,” I said, “did she do?”

“Katie . . .”

I took a step closer. Tyler was shaking.

“Tell me,” I said, “what my mother did.”

He inhaled. He parted his lips to speak, but nothing came out. I took another step closer anyway.

“She made you go, didn’t she? After the funeral?”

He could barely look at me. Heat flew through my body.

“Did you tell her no?”

“I tried, Katie. I . . .”

“Tried? Tried! I waited for you for a fucking year! I checked the mailbox twenty times a day for a year! I saw your face everywhere!

In strangers—in laundromats, in libraries. I was in love with you, and you knew it! And you didn’t have the decency to tell

me goodbye!? I had to write a thousand stories in my head, explaining why you left! Why didn’t you explain it to me? Why didn’t

you fight for me!?”

“She didn’t give me a choice! It wasn’t that simple! I didn’t want to take another child from her!”

“Were you ever going to tell me? Were you ever going to tell me that my fucking mother did this!?”

“No! That was the whole point! She wanted me to break your heart! She knew you would be like this—that you wouldn’t let me

go! That was the deal! She wanted you to hate me! She wanted it to be all my fault!”

Everything was spinning. The past eight years, upside down. Tyler, a moron. My mother, the real villain. All of it, absolutely

ridiculous. All of it, making perfect sense. Tyler, frozen at Mikey’s funeral, promising to meet me. Tyler, disappearing off

the face of the earth. My mother, digging in her heels. My father, receding into nothing. My heartbreak, manufactured. My

armor, a by-product. My whole life, somebody else’s handiwork. Somebody else’s payback.

I was a pawn, and everyone knew it but me.

“You could’ve told me,” I said. “You could’ve told me then, and you certainly could’ve told me this summer. You let me walk

into this. We could’ve handled this, we—”

“I tried to tell you! I tried to tell you at the very beginning! You wouldn’t let me speak!

You didn’t want to talk about Mikey! You didn’t want to talk about the past!

You wanted to talk about Helen Hoang and Beverly Jenkins and I don’t even fucking know!

You didn’t want to talk about what happened between us! ”

“That was before you started fucking me! That was before you pulled me out of whatever the hell I was doing with Danny! No

shit, I didn’t want to talk about my dead fucking brother! No shit, I didn’t want to talk about the way you humiliated me

when I was a teenager! But if you knew, Tyler, you could’ve explained my pain away. You could’ve at least made it all make

sense for me. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

He looked at me. It was that other look of his. The hospital. The pharmacy. And right now. The look of the love of my life,

showing me who he really was.

“Because I’m a trope,” he said. “I’m a living, breathing trope. Because I wanted you, and I wanted a second chance at you,

and I wanted to protect you, and I wanted to do it all in some parallel universe where I was a good person. Where I’d never

broken your heart. Where I was never the kind of guy who had to make this sort of deal in the first place. I wanted to be

somebody else. I wanted to be the kind of man who deserved you. I wanted a clean slate.”

I inhaled. I put my arms around him. I tried to slow the scene down.

“We can still have that,” I said. “We could start over. Just you and me. I love you. I’m always going to love you. I know

who you really are. You’re good. I promise you, Tyler. You’re good.”

He shook his head and that was it.

The light in my heart went out.

I dropped my hands and walked toward the door.

“Do you know what she said to me?” I turned to face him one last time. “The day Mikey died? She said that her life was over.

That she had no reason to go on. So if you’re wondering what she would’ve lost when you broke my heart into a million pieces,

the answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing.”