Jackson ran a hand over his bald head. “You could try.” He laughed that big booming laugh of his that made the walls shake.

I glared. He stopped laughing then and studied my face. “Did you fuck it up?”

“No!” I said.

“You did, didn’t you?” he asked. “You fucked it up.”

“Stop saying that.” I rose to my feet, checking to see how steady I was. My heart rate felt fine, I didn’t feel any tingling in my hands or feet, and my leg seemed to hold. “It’s complicated.”

I walked over to the treadmill. I knew if I was jogging on it, he couldn’t expect me to talk to him. I stepped up and hit the start button.

“What’s complicated?” He moved in front of the treadmill so I had to look at him while I walked. “You like her, she likes you—although God only knows why—and now you’re a thing.”

“We’re not a thing,” I said. “And even if we were, I don’t do long-term things, so we’d be ending in a few weeks anyway.”

“Are you terminally stupid?” he asked. “I mean, is it like a chronic condition for you?”

I ignored him and turned the machine up, breaking into a light jog. Jackson wasn’t dissuaded and just yelled at me over the treadmill’s steady hum.

“Is this why you pushed your sister away?”

Ignore him, I told myself.

“You made her cry, you know.”

I didn’t know. I slapped the stop button on the machine and hopped off it. I moved to stand in front of him. I normally hated looking up at him but I did it now.

“What are you talking about?”

“Lexi,” he said. His voice was full of disapproval. “The morning after you came home with that”—he pointed to my forehead—“she was here, but you told her that you didn’t need her to watch over you. Do you have any idea how much that hurt her? I saw her in the driveway when she left. She was crying.”

My stomach twisted. The thought of Lexi crying about me made my gut twist. Why was protecting the people I loved from the burden of caring about me making me feel like total shit?

Worried that I might succumb to another panic attack, I took a seat and hung my head.

“Annabelle called her to keep an eye on me after I cracked my head,” I said. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?” he asked. “Lexi’s your sister.”

I glanced up at him. “She hasn’t been in my life in almost twenty years. We’re not close. I hardly even know her anymore.”