A shudder grips my whole body. I shake. “You don’t understand. When I left him there, I left him with the drugs,” I whisper, feeling the shame and guilt clawing at my chest. I don’t want to tell him, but I can’t stop. “He OD’d that afternoon.” I tell him, hollow. “Dex found his body, called 911, but it was already too late. He was already dead.”
18.
Ryland doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t flinch away either. He sits right beside me, holding me tight, waiting for the rest of it, for everything that’s still unsaid.
A strange relief washes over me. He’s still here. He hasn’t pulled away.
“After that, I just…I couldn’t take it,” I tell him, needing to get it all out while I still have the courage, while his body is warm against me, and I feel like I can finally speak. “The next months, I can’t even remember them. I pretended like I was OK for my brothers, for my friends, but inside, I was numb. The guilt, it pulled me under, until I could barely breathe. And then…”
I pause, because this part is almost the worst of all.
“And then I didn’t want to keep breathing.”
There’s silence.
The thing about depression, I learned at Pinecrest, is it’s like quicksand. It’s normal for so long that you don’t even realize you’re sinking until it closes over your head and it seems like there’s no way out. I would have done anything to make the pain stop, to end feeling so wretched and used up.
A bottle of pills. A glass of whiskey. Looking back, I can’t believe I would go so close to the edge. But nothing about it made sense. I was possessed by a grief bigger than myself, a darkness I couldn’t understand. It seemed so simple at the time, that’s how far gone I was. That ending it all was clean, clear.
“I realized too late,” I say, hollow. “No,” I stop myself. “Too late would have been another half hour. But I knew the minute I swallowed the pills that it was all wrong. Like I’d been sleepwalking for months, and just woken up. I called 911, told them what I’d done. I woke up in the hospital,” I add quietly. “They pumped my stomach. They found me in time.”
Ryland is silent for a moment.
“Did you really want to die?” he asks gently.
I swallow. “I wanted the pain to stop. I didn’t think further than that. It seems crazy, I know, but I didn’t put it together until the end, that making the pain go away would make everything else stop too. And when I realized…” I trail off, remembering my horror, the shame and panic. Waiting, desperate, for the paramedics as the darkness slowly wrapped around me and pulled me down into the depths.
I’ve never been so scared in all my life.
Ryland exhales a breath I didn’t know he’d been holding in. He’s still encircling me with his arm, but now he angles his head to look down at me. His expression is shadowed in the dark, but I can sense the tenderness there.
He’s still listening. He hasn’t run from the worst of me.“And rehab?” he asks.
“My brothers were scared out of their minds,” I admit, shameful. “They decided I needed help. And I did. It was good for me,” I add quietly. “I needed to make sense of it all, to untangle all my guilt and anger over Connor. To figure out where his choices ended and mine began, and move past it all.”
Ryland sighs. “Can you ever really get over someone leaving you like that?”
I can tell from his voice, he’s asking himself as much as me.
My heart breaks for him. Connor nearly destroyed me, but there’s a difference between a love affair and your own flesh and blood.
What painful memories does this house hold for him? How many times did he pray for his mother to choose him over the drugs?
He was just a boy. And now, now he’s a man still blaming himself for something he could never have changed. I see it in his eyes, the jaded edge of disappointment that comes from having every wish you ever made turn to ash before your eyes.
He deserved more from her. He deserves the world.
“You can get over it, and you will,” I tell him, my voice growing stronger. This time, I’m the one to find his hand and bring it close to my chest. “I made it through, Ryland. I won’t go back to that darkness again. I have to learn to forgive myself every day, but I do it. I won’t let Connor throw my life away the way he did with his own. I’m stronger than that now.” I pause, nervous, but something makes me keep going.
“And so are you.”
Ryland looks at me, the pain in his eyes turning to hope. I realize in an instant how lucky I’ve been. I have my brothers, Zoey, the therapists at the center. A group of people telling me that I’m more than this, that my life will be more than the choices Connor made.
But Ryland? He’s been alone in his fight. Alone with the guilt, and shame, and loneliness, for all these years.
Not anymore.
I reach up and cradle his cheek. His stubble is rough against my palm as I hold him, trying to convince him with every fiber of my being.
“Whatever choices your mom made, they aren’t your burden to bear,” I whisper, blinking away the tears. “The only thing you can do is live the life you want and learn from her mistakes. Do you hear me, Ryland. It’s not your fault. It was never your fault. You did everything you could for her—except move on.”
19.
RYLAND
Tegan’s eyes blaze, passionate in the dim light as she gazes up at me.