“Are you sure you want to know all this?”

“By this, do you mean you?” he asked, smiling. “Yes, I want to know this.”

He seemed so sure. It was so intimidating.

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It didn’t all happen at once, you know. It sort of gradually got to the point I’m going to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“One day, I was in the basement doing laundry, and I just felt so tired all of a sudden. I went up to my room to rest for a bit but ended up sleeping for three days.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. When I woke up, I didn’t feel rested though. Like, at all. I didn’t sleep that night either. Or the one after that.”

“Not even a little bit?”

I shook my head. “It’s when I started having trouble sleeping. I’d go without for two, three days straight, and then I’d sleep for a couple of hours, stay awake for two more, and so on.”

“How long did that last?”

“Two months, give or take? One time, I went five days without sleeping, so I sort of just snapped.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I went to the medicine cabinet and grabbed my mom’s sleeping pills. I took one, but it didn’t work. So I took another—nothing.”

“Nothing?” he repeated, alarmed.

“Nothing. Finally, I started feeling sleepy. By then, I’d taken most of the bottle.”

“Jesus, Tom.”

There it was again. Tom.

“I woke up at the hospital. They had to pump my stomach; it was this huge event.”

He looked at me without saying a word, yet he spoke volumes. It was sort of similar to what Dr. Foster always did. Only, in his case, it didn’t make me want to throw anything around. It felt…comforting, which I suppose is why Dr. Foster did it too. Except, she didn’t really pull it off; she mainly just annoyed me. Ethan, on the other hand, made me want to keep talking.

Why I thought he’d somehow understand, seeing as everyone else in my life hadn’t, why I expected him to succeed at what every other person I knew had failed, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to explain. I just did. I wondered if he knew how much I was about to judge him—and for something he had absolutely no obligation whatsoever of understanding.

I couldn’t help it.

“No one believed me,” I quietly confessed, making sure I did so in a way that didn’t make it obvious I’d given the matter a second thought, but probably failing miserably.

“What do you mean?” He furrowed his brow.

“When I said it was an accident. I mean, I just wanted to sleep—”

“How come nobody believed you?”

“No one did.” I shrugged.

“After everything you’d done to help?” he asked, appalled.