Once in a long while, she would go off on a tangent, and he would be so tired that he believed her without question, only to find himself having to catch up, second-guess, and realize she wasn’t making sense. Then he would tell her, tell her to eat and sleep, and she’d usually listen. Or she’d talk at him for another few hours, while he tried to steer the conversation. The lines of reality could be that much blurrier for her when she was tired, and the tricky part was that they’d been joined at the hip for the past two years, which meant he was often tired when she was tired. It was easy to get drawn in.

And he was tired now, he was running on empty too.

Was this the thing to do? Was there another way? Could they wait? Was Kelly even that hurt?

“I know I’m not the coolest, I’m not smart, I didn’t finish high school,” she said. “If you want to lie to her about who I was, I understand. Do—”

“No,” he said. He would have teared up, if he weren’t dehydrated. The mud had dried up enough to become dirt, around them. “No, what? No. You’re the best person.”

“I’m really not.”

“You’re the first decent person I met in my life,” he said. “You’re the first person who put a real smile on my face. The first person who opened minds of people instead of closing them. You never had a mean word to say about anyone—”

“I did.”

“Anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

“You can’t let my parents—”

“I won’t,” he said, firm. “And she’ll know you if I have to talk about you ever day.”

“No. I don’t want to be a weight, like—”

She kept going back to that. The weight she hadn’t been able to leave behind. She’d blamed her parents for the unusually early onset to her schizophrenia, hinting at stress causing it, but he’d talked to the therapist, and there wasn’t any evidence that stress was linked to age of onset.

More concerning, there might have been a delirious edge to the fact she kept going back to that place. It spooked him.

So he talked, talked over her, even, because he found himself in a place where if he didn’t keep going or working his way forward, he would stop and find himself paralyzed. Because he could talk of warmer things, and all of the good things he liked about Kelly, and hopefully lift her up and keep her away from that kind of thinking.