Anything but Broken

by Joelle Knox

  Watching him fall to pieces is the best part yet.

  His grip on my wrists eases, so I tug free and wrap my arms around him. His body is a solid wall over mine, even when he’s trying to hold his weight off me. “Come here,” I whisper, pulling him closer.

  He stays, but only for the span of a few heartbeats. Then he pulls away carefully—with a quick kiss to my forehead. “I’ll be right back.”

  It’s cold when he’s gone. Sweat sheens my skin, and the fan twirling lazily overhead does its job. I shiver, but I don’t move. I don’t think I can. I’m limp and floaty, still not entirely sure I believe what just happened.

  Sex happened. Beautiful, glorious, super-hot-even-though-I-know-it’s-dangerous sex.

  And I need it to happen again. Soon.

  I’m still trying to convince myself to move when Sean reappears. He manages to free the quilt from beneath my still-trembling body, and he slides beneath it, right next to me.

  He’s warm. I turn into him, pressing against his side with a soft sigh. He still hasn’t said anything, but the silence doesn’t bother me. It’ll be a while before words are sufficient after what happened. Trying to fill up the empty air too soon will just mean we say the wrong ones.

  All I care is that he’s here. That he’s wrapping his arms around me and holding me close.

  That he’s not letting me go.

  19

  »» hannah ««

  I’m still flying when I pull into the law office parking lot just before ten. I could get used to sleepy morning cuddles and coffee with Sean before kissing him goodbye as he leaves for work. Even when Evie wrinkles her nose over her coffee cup and makes herself scarce.

  Parking my car and staring at the building brings me back down to earth. Hard. I’m here because my mother’s death has put things into motion, and a sharp shard of guilt lodges itself in my throat as I linger in the air conditioning and steady myself.

  A week. It’s barely been a week since we buried her, and I can’t quite wrap my head around it. Everything about my life has changed in such a tiny handful of days. I’m not living in Atlanta. I’m not a college student. I’m not running from my real life.

  I’m not a frozen virgin, too scared of imagined anxieties to let someone touch her.

  I’m the new Hannah, finally fully formed. But once I step from the car, the closer I get to the office door, the more I shrink in on myself. New Hannah doesn’t fit into my old life. She’s too bold, too happy, and no one here will understand the complicated twists and turns of my grief.

  So I wait sedately until the receptionist waves me in, and take my seat across from the lawyer, already itching for the meeting to be over.

  Five minutes later, I’m numb, staring down at the line-by-line accounting sheet Mr. Ewing thrust at me. Big numbers, numbers that make my twenty-five thousand dollars seem incidental. The assets first—life insurance policies and accounts and the house and my parents’ expensive cars. But after that…

  Debt after debt. Numbers with so many zeroes they make my stomach twist.

  “I don’t understand,” I whisper. “What—where did these come from?”

  He won’t look me in the eye. “I know it’s a lot to take in, especially right now, but your parents accrued considerable debt over the last few years.”

  I can see that now. What I can’t understand is how I didn’t see it then. I’ve been a co-conspirator in so many of my family’s image-protecting lies that it’s a shock to realize the biggest one of all has been happening right under my nose.

  My gaze follows the list of debts back down. It swallows the assets, and the final total is so far in the red, for a heartbeat I feel like it’s going to swallow me, too. “What does it mean? Do I—do I have to pay these?”

  “No,” he says quickly. “No. If the assets of the estate aren’t sufficient to—” He breaks off with a sigh. “Hannah, your mother’s life insurance policies—the larger ones we spoke about before—only list your father as beneficiary.”

  He’s watching me like he’s waiting for a reaction, but I’m not surprised. My mother didn’t trust me to pick out the flowers for her funeral. Marcia can swear up and down that my mother was trying to protect me, but she never had much use for me.

  “With no contingent beneficiary, the proceeds go to the estate.”

  I take another look at the balance sheet. Her life insurance policies are listed, the numbers impressively large—just not large enough to counteract the debt.

  I’m more than numb, now. The world is fuzzy and gray, and I feel disconnected from my own voice. “The house too? Everything on this list?”

  He answers quietly, his professional tone swallowed by sympathy. “Everything, Hannah.”

  I wet my lips. “So what do I do?”

  He hesitates, then barely shrugs one shoulder. “You make sure that everything of yours—everything that should be yours—is out of that house. And you move on.”

  I don’t know how I’m supposed to. My safety net disappeared. Now I have just under twenty-three thousand dollars. No scholarships. No recommendations. A screwed-up transcript with a few shitty semesters of failing grades. A part-time job that doesn’t have a hope of paying my bills for long.

  A boyfriend I’ve been lying to.

  Stupid, stupid Hannah. Caseys don’t get new lives and happily-ever-afters. We just go faster and faster until we crash into the wall in a fiery explosion, and the only thing we can control is how many people we take with us.

  »» sean ««

  Hannah isn’t answering my texts. She didn’t pick up when I called during my lunch break, either. But work is busy—two cars in for major repairs, and another three waiting—so it’s easy to chalk it up to a million things. She’s engrossed in a quilting project. She’s shopping for new things for her room. The meeting with her parents’ lawyer ran long.

  I don’t get worried, really worried, until Evie shows up at the garage just after six o’clock.

  The confusion and worry in her eyes stab through me, and I grip her arms, to hold myself steady as much as her. “Evie, what’s going on?”

  “I can’t find her.” She says it slowly, but her next words tumble out of her so quickly they’re almost a jumble. “Anywhere, Sean. We were supposed to have lunch, but she never showed. I checked your place, Sadie’s, the bar. I even called the hospital.”

  She hasn’t heard from Hannah, either. My concern melts into fear, and I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe. All I can think is that something is wrong, because Hannah wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t let everyone wonder if she was lying somewhere, hurt. Not if she could tell them otherwise.

  The lawyer. She met with the lawyer. It occurs to me in a flash, and relief rushes through me with such strength that I have to laugh. “Did you check her parents’ house? Maybe Mr. Ewing asked her to do something there. They’re settling the estate, right?”

  “Yeah.” Evie blinks at me, then nods. “No, I didn’t think about that.”

  I don’t blame her. Hannah hates the place, and the idea that she might go there willingly, just to hang out, is inconceivable. “I’ll go over there now.”

  “I can do it,” she protests.

  “Go home, Evie, in case she shows up.”

  Gibb watches from one of the bays as I put her back in her car. His expression is blank, but I know what he’s thinking. It follows me into my truck, down the road.

  How many times did I go looking for Cait when she fell off the face of the earth? Noon, three in the morning, it never seemed to matter. I was the one who had to drag her away from whatever distraction she’d found—a dip in the river, a poker game, a party full of people she didn’t know. I even coaxed her down off the water tower once, just before—

  Just before she left for South Carolina. Just before she died.

  But Hannah isn’t like that. She isn’t fighting the same demons that chased Cait. The words repeat in my head, bouncing around inside my skull like my brain has turned
into one big echo chamber. Like it’s something I need to believe instead of the truth.

  Hannah’s car is parked in the circular drive, and lights spill out of the downstairs windows. The door is unlocked, but I feel like an intruder as I open it and poke my head inside. “Hannah?”

  There’s no answer. I’m not sure she can hear me, anyway, not over the ghosts that haunt this place.

  A clatter draws my attention, and I slip through the door. Down the dark hallway, to what must have been Mr. Casey’s study. It’s all black leather and wood, with deep green walls. But I barely notice any of it, because Hannah is sitting behind the desk—

  Her fingers wrapped around a half-empty bottle of Scotch.

  She doesn’t smile when she sees me. She flinches and averts her gaze, setting the bottle down with a shaking hand. “Hi.”

  “Evie’s been looking for you.” The words come from nowhere. I didn’t decide to say them, because my brain is spinning now. I don’t know what I expected to find here, but this wasn’t it.

  She flinches again and looks at her cell phone, sitting on the edge of the desk. The screen is active, and I can see the list of notifications from here. Not a dead battery, then, or a lost handset.

  She’s been ignoring us.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles, and her sudden smile is heart-wrenching. Forced and tortured, and it looks like it’s killing her. “The meeting with the lawyer didn’t go so hot. I needed to think.”

  I sink into the chair in front of the desk, shove the bottle aside, and touch her hand. “What happened?”

  She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t turn her hand to clasp mine, either. “The Casey family happened. We always happen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My parents were broke, Sean.” A hoarse laugh shreds her throat. “Worse than broke. They were in so much debt, the estate can’t begin to cover it.”

  “Oh, Hannah.” I wrap her fingers in mine and squeeze them tight. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”

  “Yeah.” She reaches for the bottle again. “This is my inheritance. Anything I can steal from the house before they sell it, I guess.”

  And the liquor won’t change any of it. I block her hand and push the bottle farther away. “Don’t. It won’t help.”

  “I have to.” The words crack, and she sucks in a deep breath. “I have to do this, Sean. I have to let you go.”

  “Because you don’t have any money?” I ask blankly. “No one I know has any money.”

  “No, because I’m a mess.” She pulls away and crosses her arms over her chest. “You don’t even know how many ways I’m a mess. How many ways I’m going to fuck up your life if you let me. That’s all we ever do. Destroy people who try to love us.”

  I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want to have it now, when she’s had a shitshow of a day and is more than a little drunk. Nothing good can come of it. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

  “No.” She shoves the chair back, as if she needs to put even more space between us. “Just leave. Leave before I hurt you.”

  She’s angry, lashing out, and I feel my own temper begin to rise. “Hannah, you’re wasted. I’m not doing this right now. I’m not handing you an excuse.”

  “An excuse?” Hysterical laughter spills out of her. “Oh my God, you think I want an excuse to dump you? I want to be with you so much that I lied my way into your life.”

  The denial that springs to my lips dies there. “You what?”

  The blood drains from her face, leaving her pale in spite of her drunken flush. She shakes her head, slowly at first and then faster. “I’m sorry, I didn’t… Please, Sean. Just go.”

  “No.” The possibilities swim through me, carried by all those ghosts, and I round the desk. “Not until you tell me what that was supposed to mean.”

  There’s fear in her eyes now, terror, and I don’t know if it’s for herself or for me. “You couldn’t have done anything. You didn’t know.”

  I know how the words string together, what they mean. But there’s another meaning, a deeper one, wrapped up in Hannah’s panic.

  “Is this about Cait?” The words tear free of my throat, harsh as ground glass. I don’t want to know, and I have to know. I have to know.

  Hannah twists her hands together. “She was off her meds. She stopped taking them before we left for my grandmother’s.”

  “Why the hell would she do that?”

  She’s not looking at me anymore. I don’t know if she can hear me, either. “They made it all go away. I didn’t think it would work. I didn’t think anyone would believe it. Cait’s a good swimmer.”

  I wrap my hands around Hannah’s upper arms, as if I can drag her back from wherever she’s gone. Drag out the truth I don’t want to—have to—hear. “Hannah?”

  Her eyes lock on mine, red and wet with tears, and she shudders. “You know, Sean. Even if the rest of them couldn’t figure it out, you know.”

  “I don’t—” The only thing I ever knew was that Cait seemed hell-bent on self-destructing, and the possibility that that’s what Hannah is saying isn’t just unfathomable, it’s revolting. My stomach lurches, turns over. “No.”

  She can’t blink the tears away fast enough, and they slide down her cheeks. “That’s why they wouldn’t let me come to the funeral. They were afraid I’d say the wrong thing, and everyone would know.”

  Cait was the life of the party, the wild Casey girl who could never resist a dare, and where does suicide fit into that? There are a million reasons why it should feel wrong—and one reason why it must be the truth. Because Cait wasn’t healthy. She was sick, at the mercy of her own fucked-up brain chemistry, scrambling for help.

  But the doctors were supposed to be helping. “Why did she stop taking her medication?”

  “Sean—” The light glints off her cheeks as she shakes her head wildly. “Don’t make me break you.”

  Oh, fuck. “Me?” It’s the only thing more horrifying than the thought of Cait spinning out of control—that I not only didn’t stop it from happening, but that I might have been the reason. “It was because of me?”

  “Because of—” Her voice cracks. “The medication she was on. It can cause heart defects in the first trimester.”

  The word falls heavy between us, and I trip over it. I can’t do this, but I can’t turn back, either. Not anymore. “In the what?”

  She goes on, and I wish I’d listened to her and just let it go. “She was pregnant.”

  My brain grinds and sputters, like I missed a gear somewhere and stalled. I have no idea what I expected—that Cait was distraught over our breakup, even straight-up pissed off at me—but not this. Never this.

  Hannah’s staring at me. I try to say something, anything, but I’m still so stuck on her revelation that I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what the hell I feel. Anger, disbelief, sorrow, gut-wrenching pain—maybe all of it is here somewhere, buried beneath a thick layer of numb shock.

  For now, the shock is all I have. I let it turn me around, carry me to the door. Hannah’s calling out after me, but her voice is far, far away, like it’s someone else’s name she’s screaming.

  So I do what I do, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do—I drive. No destination, no goal except maybe to outrun the seething emotions boiling up from deep inside me. I can’t face my family, not now, not like this, and I left Hannah sobbing in that giant fucking tomb.

  I wind up at Gibb’s trailer. I park behind his truck and stare at the dimly lit windows for so long that he pushes open the screen door, and I have no choice but to crawl out of my vehicle.

  I only make it halfway to the newly replaced steps before the wall inside me breaks. “Cait killed herself.”

  “Shit.” Gibb steps onto the narrow porch and lets the door swing shut behind him. “You found Hannah?”

  It jars me. I’d almost forgotten why I went looking for her in the first place. “At her parents’ house, getting drunk. I guess th
e lawyer told her today—they were busted. Broke. Everything’s gone.”

  He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look anything. Even if his voice is flat and careful. “And she told you about Cait.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Part of me knows Hannah was trying to hurt me. The rest just hurts. “Or maybe it was. Fuck, I don’t know.”

  “Drunks are mean, Sean. And sometimes they’re liars.”

  “No.” Hannah wouldn’t lie, no matter how hammered she was. Not about this. “It’s bad, Gibb.”

  He watches me for a few tense moments before descending the steps. “What else did she tell you?”

  “She told me—” It won’t come, and just like that my brain is grinding again. Trying to remember if Cait ever tried to say it, or if she kept it from me because she knew I might make a different decision for all the worst reasons.

  Gibb grips my shoulder. “She told you…?”

  We can run away, Sean. Go anywhere we want. Hell, I’ll even stay here if you want me to. Just give me one more chance.

  Gibb knows all of that, everything that happened in those weeks before Cait blew out of our lives forever. As soon as I breathe the words, he’ll know it’s even more fucked up than Hannah realizes. That I made the kind of mistake you can’t fix. “I got her pregnant.”

  His fingers tighten, but his next words are a denial. “You can’t know that.”

  My anger breaks free and rises up over everything else. Only I’m not mad at Hannah now, not by a long shot. “What the hell, man?”

  “You can’t know,” he repeats. “It’s the damn truth.”

  “What?”

  “You and Cait were so fucking on and off at the end. Even if Hannah’s right…”

  The next thing I know, we’re in the dirt, gravel digging into my knees as I draw back my fist for another punch. Gibb let me have the first one, but he catches my arm this time and shoves hard, slamming me back on the driveway.

  “Say it,” I hiss. “Go on. Don’t dance around it like a fucking coward. Say it.”