“You can’t blame yourself for falling for someone. You’re human.” He says it with such utter conviction.

Those words are the ones that break me. Because he’s right.

I am human.

Not a robot after all.

Will sits there, waiting for me to respond, oblivious to the fact that he just stripped away the last of the protective armor I’ve clung to as long as I can remember. There’s so much I withheld from him over the years to protect my mom — to protect myself — but not once has it made him less steadfast. Maybe I should have confided in him all along.

I take a deep breath, knowing I have more to tell him but still scared.

“After the catastrophe with Zoe, it only got worse,” I say. “You should grab a Dr Pepper, because it’s going to take a while to explain the never-ending disaster of my family.”

He vaults over the back of the couch and rummages in the basement fridge his mom keeps well-stocked for our gaming days. “You want one?” he asks, offering me a can.

I shake my head.

“Chocolate milk?”

My mouth quirks upward a little. My comfort drink ever since we were kids. He knows me so well.

He hands me a milk box. I stab the straw through and sip it while telling him about Mom, and Dad, and everything I’ve learned about my family in the past few days. I tell him how confused I am that no one ever told me I almost had a brother, that his death was what led to the crumbling of my family. I tell him how unfair it is that I never knew, that I’ve been forced to live in my mom’s universe where the loss of Sebastian defines everything. I explain how I finally talked to my dad, and I feel like a total shithook for being so terrible to him all these years, but how could I be blamed when I only knew half the story? I tell Will how much I want to visit Dad, but how scared I am to leave Mom alone.

He leans back on the other side of the couch when I’m done. “Wow,” he says. “What if you went to see your dad at the end of the semester?” he asks. “It might help to catch up with him, not to mention that England would be awesome.”

“Leaving my mom after all this Sebastian stuff . . . I don’t know,” I say. “Everything is so fresh. I don’t even know what it’s going to be like now.”

“Getting out for a while might help,” he says.