It’s time I do something by myself.

It’s time I really face her, and talk to her, because just like it’s not Maddox’s job to protect me, it’s not my job to take care of her. To be her punching bag. I accept her anger and hate of my father and let her make it about me.

If I could look Adrian in the eyes and tell him about my father, I can do this. If I can survive the pain in his eyes, I can do anything, which is why I don’t even let my legs shake as I walk up the stairs. I don’t stress enough to let my heart go rapid.

And I hope she’s okay. God, I hope she is, but I can’t make it my responsibility to make her that way. We all deal with our pain in a different way, I realize. Maddox is broken because he takes the blame for Dad. Thinks he should have done something. I want to fix everything. I take responsibility for Mom’s anger at me. I tried to make it better for all for us when no one, no one can fix anything for anyone else.

And Adrian. My heart jumps at the thought of him. He puts more blame on himself than all of us combined. For Ashton. For leaving his sister and not stopping his father. He’s lived with this misplaced responsibility since he was a kid. It’s been eating him alive ever since.

I grab the railing and close my eyes, willing the tears to stay back. I miss him. I miss him so much that I had to force myself to leave the bed, but I have to do this.

After taking a couple deep breaths, I finish the walk to Mom’s apartment. I raise my hand and knock on the door.

“Who is it?” she calls, but I don’t answer. Instead I try the handle, which is unlocked, so I open the door.

“It’s Laney,” I say as I close it behind me.

“I wondered how long it would take before you came to check on me.” She’s sitting on the small love seat. The TV’s off and she’s crocheting. It’s so normal that you’d never know she tried to kill herself a month ago. That she’s fine and then suddenly she’s not. You’d never know she hates me.

“I’m here now.” Walking over to the chair across from her, I sit down.

“I’m all medicated up.” Mom picks up a pill bottle and shakes it. “A dose of happiness once a day. Everything’s better now. You don’t have to try and fix me.”

Her words sting.

“Where’s your brother?” she asks.

I look at the hooks in her lap, a memory floating to the surface. “Remember when I was little and you tried to teach me to crochet? I was horrible. I never could get it, but I still have the afghan we worked on together.”

She sighs and smiles a little. “I remember. That was when everything was good. Before your father started chasing women and you started chasing him.”

And there’s the slap I’ve been waiting for. “I didn’t chase him. He’s my dad and I was a child. What kind of person do you think I am?”

She opens her mouth to speak, but I keep going. “You know what? I don’t want to know what kind of person you think I am. Instead, I’m going to tell you who I am. I’m the little girl who felt special because her father, who’d always been closer to her brother, started showing her attention. The girl who was scared and confused when her mother suddenly wanted nothing to do with her. Who didn’t get why her brother stopped playing ball or why her dad started to be gone all the time. Who thought if she got good enough grades and did all her homework and didn’t date and just tried to be good that everything would be okay.”

“Delaney—”

“No. I’m not done yet. I was a scared little kid who suddenly found out her father killed a boy. Whose dad went to jail and her brother, her best friend, drifted farther away from her. And you? That whole time you never held me or told me it would be okay or never cried with me. You let me find you bleeding to death. I held you and thought you were going to die and then you blamed me for saving you!”

I find myself standing over Mom, shouting while she stares at me, gaping. “And still! Still I thought if I was good enough or nice enough or tried to fix things, they would be okay. But they weren’t. You hated me more and Maddy lost more of himself and I tried, tried so badly to hold it together for us all. I went to see the woman I thought was the little boy’s mom! I bet you didn’t know that. And I apologized for what Daddy did, and she, this woman I didn’t know, cried with me when you never did!”

“Delaney!” she screams, standing up and letting everything fall from her lap.

“No. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to stop me from saying this. All I wanted was for us to be okay. To try and be some kind of family after everything that happened. To deserve to be okay again and then I hurt—no, I fucking broke—the only person to ever really make me feel normal. To make me smile and to see that I had secrets and imperfections inside me but to like me regardless of them. I loved him. And I think he could have loved me. Me.” My closed fist comes down against my chest, over my heart. “Me. And I ruined it. I betrayed him and what he meant to me and I’ll never, ever forgive myself for that.”

She slaps me, whipping my head to the side. My hand shoots to my stinging face, holding my cheek as we stand there staring at each other.

“How dare you talk to me like that! He was my husband. Mine. My life was ruined because of him. I lost my home and we had debts to pay, debts he told me he’d been taking care of. You didn’t have to deal with any of that, so don’t make this out like you lost more than me.”

Finally, finally my tears have dried. I can’t shed any more. Not for her or my father. “It’s not about who lost the most. It’s about trying to make it through it together.”

“Get out,” she tells me.

I close my eyes. Take a deep breath. Consider saying more, but I can’t. It’s not in me any longer.

“Get out,” she says again.

“I love you, Mom. Take care of yourself. I can’t help you do it anymore.”

For the second time in a week, I leave when someone tells me to, only this time, everything inside me doesn’t wish I could go back.

Chapter Twenty-Three

~Adrian~

I drove until I was almost out of gas, pulled over to fill up, and started driving again before I stopped at some nothing town in South Carolina. I haven’t left the tiny, dark hotel room since I got here.

Money’s tight and soon I won’t have any more, but I don’t care. Don’t fucking care about anything.

I haven’t smoked weed since before I left. Not like I couldn’t find it if I wanted to, but it was never about a need for me. It wasn’t about addiction. It was about forgetting and now I can’t let myself forget. It’s there in my head all the time, raining down on me. Flooding me and I’m drowning in it.

I’m ready to let myself sink.

My eyes sting because I don’t close them for long. Every time I do, I see Ash. See him smiling at me. See him fucking loving me as the car is coming at him. His little body on the ground and knowing that I failed him.

Except now it’s not a guy behind the wheel. It’s Laney and it makes the loss multiply until I feel nothing but the pain.

Daddy, daddy, daddy. His voice is in my ears and his face in my head and sometimes it makes me smile because I think it’s real. Think I hear his voice or see his face, but even in those dreams or thoughts where we’re not standing in that yard, the car always comes and it always takes him from me.

I grab Ash’s shirt and push it into my pocket, needing to get out of the room. Pulling the door open, everything freezes inside me at the same time I’m burning alive.

“Motherfucker.” I lunge at Delaney’s brother as he stands outside my hotel room. My forearm goes straight to his throat as I back him up against the brick wall and hold him there. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I’ve been following your ass through two states.”

“How the hell—”

Maddox cuts me off. His voice is rough as it tries to squeeze out from under the pressure I’m putting on him. “I left, but I was worried about Laney so I asked around about where you lived. It wasn’t hard to find out. When I got there, you were leaving. I started to follow you and for some reason, I just kept going. When I finally decided to talk to you, it was kind of hard to catch you since you’re not man enough to leave your room.”

Jerking my arm away from him, I let my fist fly right into his face. Blood rushes out of his nose and I flash to Ash, which gives him the delay he needs to run at me. He slams me into the wall on the other side of the walkway, before he hits me back. With everything I have in me, I push off the wall and we hit the other one, then the ground, both of us swinging at each other. Neither of us getting anywhere, besides trading blows.

“You’re a bastard and you don’t deserve my sister. She doesn’t deserve to get hurt for trying to make things right,” he says between punches.

“She fucking lied to me. She was playing games the whole fucking time!” I groan when his fist slams into my stomach.

“If you think that, then you definitely don’t deserve her, because you don’t know shit about her.”

And damned if I don’t know he’s right. If I don’t know those ghosts in her eyes were because she was just as haunted as me. If I don’t remember how she touched me and how she looked at me and the gift she gave me… but still, all that time she knew.

I pull my fist back to hit him again and he doesn’t try to stop me. He just lies there, and I want to hit him so bad. Want him to feel some of the pain I do, but instead I push off him and sit against the building. We’re in an outside hallway. I’m surprised no one came out with the fighting, but don’t care either.

“Knowing her or not doesn’t matter. It’s not enough.” I’m breathing heavy. My face and body are killing me.

Maddox curses before grabbing a backpack from the ground. He pulls something out of it to wipe the blood from his face before he sits across from me. Neither of us speaks for a long time and then he reaches into his bag again, pulls out a fifth of whiskey, takes a pull, and then hands me the bottle.

It takes me a second, but I grab it, take a drink, and then hand it back.

“She cares too much,” he finally says. “She’s sweet… despite all the shit we’ve been through. I know it doesn’t make sense, but in her mind she thought it would help. She wanted to believe she had the power to make it better.”

I grab the bottle from him and take another drink. I know he’s right. Know she wanted to try and fix it. That was one of my favorite things about her, wasn’t it? How sweet she was. How innocent. But then I see Ash again and the pain squeezes me so tight I can’t breathe. “It’s still not enough.”

“Then you’re a bigger pussy than I thought,” Maddox says.

“And what are you running from? Don’t sit there and pretend you’re not fucking weak too. Don’t pretend she’s never shed tears over you.”

“Touché.” He takes a drink. “Did she tell you she found Mom the first time she tried to kill herself? That Mom knew Laney would be home soon. That she’d be the one to find her, yet she still slit her wrists in the unlocked bathroom right before Laney got home. That my little sister was scared to death her mom would die and she sat in her blood with her mom’s head in her lap and when she was okay, that same mom yelled at her for saving her. That she was pissed she was alive and blamed Laney.”

“Fuck.” I drop my head backward. Look at the ceiling. I knew she had tried to kill herself, but I didn’t know the details.

“I know you lost someone but you’re not the only one. She watched her mom almost die, more than once. She still loves her and cares about her, even though she always gets shut down. She lost her dad that day too. She lives with those memories. Lives with the knowledge that her mom will never love her like she should, yet she’s a whole hell of a lot better than we are. She doesn’t fucking run. She’s stronger than we could ever hope to be.”