But I would be there when she was able to think clearly again. And I wouldn’t be pushed away so easily. Still, for now, I would let her be. And I wouldn’t make a scene.
I walked away from the girl I loved into a house full of mourning and pain and knew that nothing I did would change things or make them better.
This was the beginning of the end. And I had to do the one thing I hated.
I had to walk away from the girl I loved.
And hope to hell she would let me walk back in again.
Chapter 18
Elise
* * *
“Elise, darling, you need to eat.”
I looked at my mother and shook my head. “I had an omelet this morning. I’m not hungry for lunch.” I hadn’t been hungry for breakfast either, but I had forced it down, mostly because I knew my mom wouldn’t stop hounding me. Something twisted deep inside. The fact that my mom cared enough to be here for me, that she was alive in order to do it at all, broke something within me, and I didn’t know what to think. Everything hurt. How could Corinne be gone?
It didn’t make any sense. My best friend should be walking through that door at any moment, telling me it was all a joke that had gone too far. I would hate her forever for it, but I would still love her until the end of time. How could she be gone? My best friend since we were five years old, could not be gone.
“I know you did, honey, but will you please eat lunch with us? We’re so worried about you, and we don’t know what else to do.”
I looked at my mother and sucked in a breath. Tears ran down her cheeks, and I didn’t understand. My mother never cried. She got emotional, yes, but she always held herself in check. I remembered my grandmother once saying that she had done it as a child and hadn’t stopped. And I had never been comfortable enough to ask her why. But here she was, crying in front of me. My dad stood in the doorway in his sweater, the one he wore when he was stressed out with work. There were holes in the sleeves, and it was coming undone at the ends. My mother had knitted it for him when she was pregnant with me because she had promised herself that she would learn how to knit. She had made me booties and other cute things that I had worn for as long as I could fit into them. She had knitted a blanket that I still had somewhere. And she had knitted Dad that sweater. She hadn’t made anything else after that. I hadn’t been sure if she’d quit because she hadn’t wanted to fit into a certain box when it came to being a doctor’s wife in their circles, or if she’d chosen to quit on her own.
I had never asked.
Because I was so busy trying to find out who I was, and I hadn’t taken a step back to realize that I didn’t know who my parents were as adults either.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to know those things. Perhaps children never did. But Corinne’s parents would never be able to see how their daughter grew up. And Corinne wouldn’t be able to question why her parents had made the choices they had—both good and bad.
I hated that.
I swallowed hard, tears falling freely now. My mother sat next to me on the couch, looking through the window at the trees.
“I’m not hungry, but I’ll eat dinner. I promise. I’ll take care of myself. But I don’t think I can stomach anything right now.”
My mother nodded and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back, afraid of what I’d do if she let go.
“We don’t know what to do for you, honey. We want to help, but we don’t know what to do.”
My dad cleared his throat and moved to stand next to the edge of the bay window so he was in our line of vision but not too close. There wasn’t room for him on the couch, but he was still there. My throat tightened, and I held back more tears.
“We want to talk to you about what happened,” my dad said, and I stiffened. “If you can’t talk to us, talk to your friends. To Dillon. Anyone.”
“Dillon and I are over,” I said, wondering why that was the first thing that came out of my mouth.
My dad’s mouth tightened into a thin line, and he nodded. “I’m sorry to hear that. We only know his name because of your roommate. Nessa mentioned him in passing. I didn’t mean to pry, even though that’s what we do so often. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t understand these people in front of me. They weren’t acting like my parents at all. But then again, I wasn’t acting like myself. And yet I couldn’t find the energy to act like anyone other than who I was in that moment.
Corinne wasn’t here. If she was, everything would make more sense. I would be able to breathe again. Things would go back to normal. I’d be able to stress out over my major and what my parents thought I needed to do with my accomplishments. I’d be able to freak out over a boy and wonder if I loved him or not. But instead, I was sitting with my parents, wearing black and wondering why my best friend had to die.
She was only twenty years old. You weren’t supposed to die when you were twenty. You were supposed to live forever. She hadn’t even had her first legal drink. She’d never had sex. My best friend had died a virgin. She’d never been in love and had died alone. I hadn’t been there.
“Please, talk to us,” my mother whispered. “Please, Elise. We don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know what to do either. She’s gone, mom. Corinne is gone.
My mother swallowed hard and squeezed my hand again. “We know, honey. I’m so sorry. She was such a sweet girl.”
I gasped. “You hated her.”
My mother sat back, her eyes wide, the look on her face one of shock. “No, we didn’t.”
“You always said that I needed to make new friends. That she wasn’t making the right choices.”
My mother shook her head. “No, the two of you were joined at the hip for so long that you pushed others away when you were younger. And maybe we were meddling, but we loved Corinne. We may not have understood her because she was so vivacious and loud in her choices. But that was because, well…your dad and I are shy.”
I snorted. “What?
Dad sighed. “We’re not shy with you, but with others? It’s taken a while to make the people you see today. We were raised not to speak out, not to do anything but stay in our lane and not make waves. We made waves in our careers, but not in anything else. You were always brighter than the sun when you were with Corinne, and she was your focal point, the star in the sky that shone against everyone. We may not have known Corinne as well as we should have, and that’s on us, but I will forever be glad that she was in your life.”
I swallowed hard, not understanding. “What are you guys talking about?”
My mother sighed. “It took so long to get pregnant with you,” my mother said.
I frowned. “What?
“It took us so long. So many treatments. We lost three babies before you. You were our rainbow baby, as they call it. And yet the three before you? We didn’t get to name them. We didn’t get to hold them in our hands and in our arms and say goodbye. You were it for us. And somehow along the way, we wanted to make sure that you had everything, and we twisted that. And now, Corinne’s parents will never be able to watch their child grow up. Never watch her fall in love or get married or find her happiness. Their memories of their daughter will be frozen in time only to fade away if they’re not careful. But I know them, darling. They will keep her memory bright, but I don’t know how they’ll move on. We never moved on after losing our first three children, and I would break if I lost you,” my mother said, her voice shaking.
“And I’d be broken right alongside her,” my dad added. This time, the tears flowed freely down my face.
I choked, my body shaking. “All of this was because you love me?”
“Yes. And we were wrong. We’re not going to push you like we have been. We’re going to do whatever we can to make up for the choices we made when it came to you. We will always trust the choices you make, even if we question them because…we do have some experience with some things.”
“I don’t understand,” I said again. “You guys were so mean.�
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“And we were idiots,” my mom said, throwing up her hands. “Stupid idiots who thought we knew best. Maybe we do in some things, but not everything. I’ll listen now. I promise I will. But don’t push me away. Don’t push us away. Let us be part of your life. Corinne’s parents will never get to hold their daughter again, and I don’t know what I would do if I never got to hold you. If you walked away forever and we didn’t have you in our lives. I’m sorry that we lost so much time. That we were such horrible people. But I love you, Elise.”
“I love you, too. So fucking much,” my dad said, and I blinked at the vulgarity. Dad never cursed in front of me. I hadn’t been sure he knew how.
“Maybe we should get to know you as an adult, rather than the little girl in our heads.”
I looked at my mother, so confused, and it felt like my heart kept breaking over and over again. Shattered into a thousand pieces where I knew it could never be glued together with any type of emotion or connection.
“I just want you to be happy, and I don’t know how we can make that happen. But we’ll always be here. Even if we make mistakes again, we’ll atone for them. We’ll do something.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can think about any of that right now. But I don’t want you to atone for anything. Corinne doesn’t have any more time, and I don’t want to lose time wondering what if and what we lost. I just want things to go back to normal. Or a new normal where you guys are proud of me, and Corinne is still here, making me laugh and giving me dares and telling me truths.”
“Dares and truths?” my mom asked.
I shook my head. “It’s a long story.”
Mom squeezed my hand, and Dad came closer.
He cleared his throat. “I’d love to hear it, if you think we have time.”
I looked at my parents. I knew that Corinne was never coming back. As much as I wanted her to be here, she couldn’t come back. Rationally, I knew that I couldn’t have saved her, that no matter how fast I was, I would never be fast enough to stop an aneurysm.
But I couldn’t get over it in a blink. I didn’t know if that would ever happen.
Somehow, I would have to find a way to breathe again.
I just didn’t know how to do that.
And so I sat between my parents, and I told them about the dares and the jokes.
We ate lunch, even though I didn’t think I’d be able to, and I cried hard, and they held me close. When we got to Corinne’s final dare, I skated over the truth, but the knowing look in my mother’s eyes said that I hadn’t done it well enough.
“So I take it this dare was Dillon?” Mom asked.
“Are you going to tell us what happened with you and that boy?” my dad asked, sounding very fatherly and not so judge-y.
“It didn’t work out,” I said, shrugging. Nothing about what I felt for Dillon or the thoughts filtering through my mind were casual, but I wasn’t sure I could voice them. Not even to myself.
“When did you break up with him?” my mother asked.
“Why do you think I’m the one who broke up with him?” I was deflecting, and we all knew it.
“When?” Mom asked softly.
“At the wake, because I’m a horrible person.”
My mother shook her head. “We all make terrible decisions in grief. We make big ones, small ones, and a lot of them are terrible. Were you thinking about breaking up with him for a while?”
I shook my head. “Honestly, the only time I thought about it at all before was after our conversation here.”
My mother had the grace to blush, and my dad sighed.
“We’re not used to this whole adult you. And that’s on us.”
“I’m not used to this whole adult me either. But I don’t think I can fix what I broke. I was mean. I said I couldn’t take it anymore, that it was all too much. I told him to go.”
My mother shook her head. “It’s been three days. Has he texted? Because to me, that says you need space, not that it’s over.”
I pressed my lips together and nodded. “He’s texted. Every day, just to check in on me and tell me that I don’t need to respond. But he also said he wanted to hear my voice because he likes the sound of it.”
My mom’s eyes filled with warmth, even as my dad gave me a skeptical look. “Either that boy is in love with you, or he’s using the best lines.”
That made me laugh, and I honestly didn’t think I’d ever be able to laugh again. “Dad.”
My dad shrugged. “What? I was a twenty-something-year-old-boy before. He is twenty-something, right? And not some forty-year-old going back to school?”
I snorted. “He’s a month older than me.”
“Good. We’re going to want to meet him.”
My heart twisted again. “But we’re not together, Dad.”
Mom leaned forward. “I don’t know if that’s quite true. I think you should talk to him.”
“Do you think this is a time for me to make big decisions?” I asked my mother, tossing her words back in her face.
She put a finger in the air, marking it as a little invisible point. “Or you’re just fixing the decision that you made before. Your teachers have given you the rest of the semester off so you don’t have to worry about school, but you already finished your coursework, so that’s no problem. You have time before the winter break. Before he goes home.”
“He lives in that house, Mom. His family is from Denver. They own the brewery, remember?”
My mom nodded. “I was just making sure that he was still going to be here for the break. Because I want to meet him.”
“Mom,” I said, laughing again, surprising myself. I was still crying off and on, but this was a conversation I had always wanted to have. Maybe not about Dillon per se, but feeling so open.
I only hated that it had taken losing my best friend for us to do this. Maybe we would have been able to do this without that, but I wasn’t sure. I could still hate the process that had brought us to the outcome.
“You should go see him.”
“Right now?” my dad asked. “Shouldn’t we run a background check first?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
“I know people.”
“Are you in the mob now?” I asked.
“As I said, I know people.” He snorted and shook his head. “Do you know if he’s at home?
I looked down at my phone, checked the time. “He should be. If not, I don’t know. But you’re right. I need to fix this, figure out what I want.”
“You can always text him.”
I shook my head at my mom’s words. “As I said, he likes the sound of my voice, so he deserves to hear it when I grovel and apologize for being so mean to him at the wake.”
“If he’s any sort of man, he’s not going to blame you for hurting at your best friend’s funeral,” my dad growled.
“Just because I was hurting doesn’t mean I’m allowed to hurt others.”
“Maybe,” my mother added. “But perhaps you two should just talk.” She looked over at Dad. “Look at us, honey, we’re being so adult about this whole thing. Our daughter’s dating. In a serious relationship, it sounds like. We’re growing.”
“Growth has its advantages.”
I didn’t know if this bubble of peace in tragedy would stick, but I leaned into it. The relief that slid through me at the fact that I felt like I could come to my parents again was worth its weight in gold.
I missed Corinne so damn much.
I sat with my family for another hour as we talked about nothing because we could. Because Corinne didn’t have that option.
Suddenly, I found myself in my car, headed towards the guys’ house.
I missed them all so much. They’d all come to the funeral—even their families. They were there for us, and I knew from Nessa that the girls were staying at the house on college row. Mostly because we weren’t sure if we could go back to living in the home where we had lost someone we loved. Nessa and N
atalie had mentioned something about our landlord, and I felt like if we ended up roommates again, we would likely be living elsewhere. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay in the place we had lived with Corinne. Maybe not wanting to be there made me a horrible person. I would never be able to walk into that living room again without seeing Corinne there, death in her eyes and a small ghost of a smile on her face. The last one she’d ever have.
I sniffed, annoyed with myself for crying. I was here to see Dillon and apologize. I didn’t need to be a puffy mess. I pulled into the back of the home since street parking was hard to come by, then rolled my shoulders back.
I didn’t see his truck, but he could still be here. Sometimes, he parked on the street when they were saving a spot thanks to the snow.
I slid out of the car and zipped up my coat as a cold breeze hit. I knew a storm was coming. If I weren’t careful, I’d be snowed in here.
That might be comforting, but it could also be another achingly horrible thing to add to the day.
I took a few steps, heard a crunch behind me, and turned.
I saw a shadow, and then something hit me upside the head.
I fell.
And then there was nothing.
Chapter 19
Dillon
* * *
“All done, then?”
I looked up as Pacey walked towards me, his bag slung over his shoulder.
“Yeah. The semester’s over. Let the holiday season commence.”
I knew I sounded exhausted, and not just from school, but Pacey didn’t say anything about it.
“You mind giving me a ride back?”
I frowned. “You didn’t drive yourself here?” I asked, looking around the parking lot on campus as if expecting to see his car amongst the dozen or so there.
“I rode in with Miles. I didn’t feel like remembering what side of the road I should be on.”
My One Night: An On My Own Novel Page 18