“It was two years ago today,” he continued. “I had this job after school working at a hardware store, and I got paid that day, so I stopped on the way home and picked up some groceries. Orange juice, eggs, milk—shit like that. She was still warm when I found her. If I hadn’t stopped, I don’t know—maybe she’d still be alive.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s not true.”

“I know it’s not my fault, but sometimes I wonder whether things would have been different, you know, if I hadn’t stopped that day.”

“My grandma says that everyone’s time is set. That it’s already determined. That was her day.” She touched him then, running her hand over the muscles of his upper back and shoulders.

“Maybe.” He dropped his head forward. “Would you rub my other shoulder too?”

She hesitated, unsure how to reach his other shoulder, and then she was scooting her body behind his to get better leverage, her thighs straddling his hips as she began to massage his upper shoulders and neck. “Like that?”

“Yeah.” He tilted his head from one side to the other, groaning when she squeezed a tight muscle. “I still think about her every day. I don’t try to. It just happens. Most of the time she was more worried about getting her next fix than what I was doing, but sometimes she was almost like a normal mom, you know, concerned about me and stuff.”

Katie wanted to wrap her arms around him, but she was afraid it was too soon, so she contented herself with running her hands over his neck and shoulders and said the words that came to her. “You miss her.”

“I used to sing to her. She was always asking me to. That night when I drove you home and you asked me to sing to you, it reminded me of that. She gave me my first guitar.”

Minutes passed, her hands sliding over his back and neck and occasionally dipping below the collar of his shirt to the warm skin beneath as she absorbed the enormity of what he’d confided. He’d found his mom dead when he was sixteen, the same age she was now. Tears came to her eyes. She had an overwhelming desire to protect him and keep him from ever being hurt again, to be the one person who would never leave him. In that moment, she knew she couldn’t hold back her own truth. He had to know all of her, like she knew all of him.

“Matt?” Her hands began to shake slightly.

“Yeah?”

She’d stopped massaging him and was gripping his shoulders, her forehead pressed against his neck as she prepared to tell him something only her parents, grandma and psychiatrists knew. She closed her eyes. “I cut myself.”

Chapter 36

36