chapter 16
“Why didn’t you tell me when you booked the reservation?” I asked. “Why the games? The midnight rides with Lola? Why make me feel like a visitor in my own life?”
“I thought I could have both,” he said simply. “I wanted to be with you and also be the one who saved them. I thought I was being a grown-up by compartmentalizing. It was a stupid, awful idea.”
“You never asked me to help. You never asked for a hand-up, or a shoulder. You made it so I had to watch you from the outside and guess which version of you I was supposed to love.” I felt steam rise in my chest—hot and furious. “That’s not love.”
He closed his eyes, and for a moment I saw a boy, nineteen, exhausted in an office with a sleeping teenager on the cot, a cramped bank balance and a phone full of numbers. I saw the kind of stubborn care that is both beautiful and dangerous. I thought of the nights I had sat awake, listening to the sound of his light breathing and feeling no warmth, only distance.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I could have told you the truth. I didn’t.”
“What am I supposed to do with the truth, Kobe?” The question was sharp but not cruel. I wanted him to know how fully I understood the moral complexity, and that understanding did not obligate me to return to the way things had been.
That was the hinge. For a second, possibility hovered—both paths open and bright in different ways. He could have then offered to put everything on the table, to make amends, to restructure his life so we could be a pair that included the messy obligations he had. Instead, the choice he had made for me by omission had already been the choice that defined him.
“I don’t want to break up your promises,” I said finally. “If you promised to help them, that’s… I don’t want to be the person that undoes a safety net.”
He looked at me as if someone had handed him a map and asked him to read it in a language he’d been pretending to know. “Then what do you want?”