Chapter 11
Later, after everything was settled, I finally learned Xander’s side of the story.
It turned out he had known me far longer than I ever knew.
When he was a child, he had grown up in the countryside by accident.
He had been switched at birth and raised in the wrong family.
His father drank, gambled, and was violent whenever he was in a bad mood.
His mother couldn’t take it and left.
By the time he was eight, he was already doing the farm work and housework on his own.
That was when he met me.
I had been sent to the countryside for a while because I was sickly as a child and my family thought the fresh air would help.
My relatives doted on me.
Apparently, one day I ran into the village store holding a mountain of candy and snacks and paid for all of it without blinking.
Xander, on the other hand, had taken the last few dollars in his pocket and bought a bottle of pesticide.
He told me this much later in an almost casual tone.
As if it were a story about someone else.
As if he hadn’t once been a little boy so tired of life that he thought ending it might be easier.
Then he said I came up to him outside the store and offered him a lollipop.
I had pointed curiously at the bottle in his hand and asked, “What drink is that? Can I try some?”
He told me, expressionless, “It’s not a drink. It’s poison for bugs. People aren’t supposed to drink it.”
Then I had apparently asked, very seriously, “If bugs drink it, do they die too?”
He said yes.
And somehow I decided that meant I needed to watch him spray it on the vegetables.
Except I was spoiled and careless and ended up touching the bottle cap.
It irritated my skin immediately.
The bottle spilled.
I nearly cried.
And instead of doing any of the fieldwork he had planned, Xander spent the whole day taking care of me.
Putting ointment on my skin.
Trying to stop me from crying.
Distracting me until I laughed again.
When I finally left, I waved at him and said cheerfully, “See you tomorrow, big brother!”
After I ran off, he looked down and saw the empty bottle in the dirt.
Only then, he told me, did he remember why he had bought it in the first place.
But by the next day, I had already gone back to the city.
Our little promise of “see you tomorrow” never happened.
Still, from that day on, he never thought about giving up on life again.
He started climbing.
Slowly.
Painfully.
Relentlessly.
By college, because he was constantly dealing with debt collectors and came back bruised all the time, people started calling him the school tyrant.
Then he met me again.
Years later.
And I didn’t remember him at all.
But I started chasing him.
He said when that happened, he looked calm on the outside, but inside he felt like he had been blindsided by something too good to believe.
At first, when I started changing his clothes and his appearance, he didn’t think much of it.
Until one day, by accident, he found an old photo album of mine.
It documented my life year after year.
And on the earliest pages, there was a little boy.
Over and over.
Standing beside me.
Playing with me.
Smiling with me.
Lucas.
When Xander casually asked Lena who that was, she told him, “Probably the brother-type crush Harper had when she was little. They grew up together. He’s super smart. He went abroad.”
That was the first time Xander panicked.
Then Lucas came back.
Black hair.
Black glasses.
Gentle, steady, rational.
The very image I had tried to turn Xander into.
And from there, everything spiraled.
Every small change in me.
Every time I acted distant.
Every time I stopped clinging to him.
He took all of it as proof.
That he had never really been loved as himself.
That he had only been filling in for somebody else.
By the time I asked to break up, all the resentment and hurt he had been holding back finally burst.
So he agreed.
But after the breakup, the first thing he did after gaining enough control in the Hale family was cancel the marriage alliance his mother wanted.
Then he bought media coverage to make sure the whole world knew it.
And after that?
He dyed his hair black again.
Went to the library.
Put on glasses.
Followed me like a person trying very hard to stay sane and failing quietly anyway.
Just to make me look at him a little longer.
He even admitted, in a voice so calm it scared me, that at one point he had wondered whether changing his whole face would make me choose him forever.
And at that club dinner, when he dressed like Lucas and stole me away while I was drunk?
He said he felt like a thief.
All he wanted was to steal one little piece of affection from me.
Only to find out it had been his all along.
When he finished telling me everything, I sat there for a long time without speaking.
Then I climbed into his lap, wrapped my arms around his neck, and kissed him.
He kissed me back with his eyes closed.
And for a while, neither of us said anything at all.