I can feel Nate staring at me still, but I can’t look at him. I want to disappear. I want this moment to stop existing. Without warning, my eyes blur. I swipe at my face aggressively and force my tears back to where they belong before they can fall.

“That was a long time ago,” I say to Nate, my voice taut, barely above a whisper. It’s all I can manage.

He stares at me, eyes unblinking, and a horrible pit opens in my stomach. I can almost feel my heart drop through it. “What happened?”

He doesn’t sound as indignant as I expected, but I can taste the distrust in his voice like iron on my tongue. Even though I hate the question, I’m grateful for his curiosity, that he wants to hear my side of the story.

I knew this day would come. I just didn’t think it would happen like this. I wanted it to be on my own terms, me offering him another layer of myself. Not on the defense, not like I’ve betrayed him.

I exhale a long, heavy breath, deciding to be vulnerable, that I have to, though I know it’ll hurt. He deserves honesty.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I start, but there’s a tremor in my voice, and I have to stop and start again, and when I do, I’m not sure how to explain it all. I’ve never had to.

After my parents died, I was quiet.

There was nothing wrong with me; I just didn’t feel like talking. It was as if nothing or no one was worth the effort anymore. I stuck to myself. I rarely ever spoke. The caseworker I was assigned to didn’t know how to deal with me—or didn’t want to deal with me, so after I got kicked out of the first home, she sent my paperwork to a group home for troubled girls, and they accepted me.

That’s what they called me. Troubled.

I had to get dropped off at school in a dirty white van, and I just knew the other kids, the ones with parents and families and friends, could smell it on us, on me, that troubled stench. And if the stale stink was only in my mind, they definitely saw it, that robotic blah-ness a heavy dose of psychotropic meds turns you into.

Just the thought of Nate looking at me that way, like there’s something wrong with me, like I am mentally disturbed or unstable, is enough to crush me, but I push through the shame and the guilt and tell him everything.