Page 26 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
The room received him the way it always had, without a sound, exactly as he'd left it. The made bed, the hoodie on the chair, the little crowd of photographs he'd dusted himself every week because he couldn't bear to let a stranger do it. He sat on the edge of the bed that nobody slept in, and he didn't turn on a lamp. He knew the room by heart; he had built it that way on purpose, a place time wasn't allowed to touch.
He'd come in here to remember why.
Why the rules. Why the walls. Why he'd spent a week turning a warm, loud, impossible girl back into a stranger, one cold morning at a time. He had come to stand in the wreckage of his sister and let it remind him what he owed, and what he had almost thrown it away for.
The girl was forbidden, and she had been forbidden from the first night, on two counts he had no way to argue down. She was a lifetime too young for him, and the heart that kept her alive had once been his to bury. He had let himself forget both, for a week, and this was the price of remembering.
Instead he opened the top drawer of her desk, looking for nothing, the way grief goes looking.
And there it was.
The necklace. The cheap little chain with the crooked star she'd bought herself at fourteen with her own babysitting money and refused to ever take off, the one thing of hers he hadn't been able to put behind glass because his hands wouldn't cooperate. He lifted it out. It weighed nothing. It'd always weighed nothing. That was the cruelty of the things people leave. They're so light, and they hold so much.
Smile, Max. Your face won't crack.
And the thing he had kept locked down for two years, the thing the rules were built to hold, finally came up through all of it at once, and Maximo folded over his sister's necklace in the dark of the room he had turned into a tomb, and shook, silent and undone, something in him coming loose that would never be set right again.
For his sister. For the two years.
And, worst of all, for the living girl down the hall, whose laugh he could still hear, whose confession he'd answered with nothing, whose only crime in this entire world was surviving the night that took Mary from him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
FOR ONE EVENING, HEthaws.
I don't know what changes. I only know that he comes home at a human hour, and he asks if I've eaten, and when I say no he cooks, actually cooks, the pan and the knife and the whole domestic emergency of it, and for the length of one dinner I get my Maximo back like he was never gone.
We don't talk about the study, or the silence, or the week of frost. A smart girl would use a rare thaw like this to dig for answers about where he went and why. I've been calling myself a smart girl my whole life, and tonight I let the whole smart part go. We talk about nothing. It's the best nothing of my life.
Afterward he walks me to my door, the way he did the very first night, a whole head above the world, and there's a moment on the threshold where the air goes tight and strange. My borrowed heart starts up quick and giddy, reaching for him the way it always does when he stands this close, and I press a hand to my sternum and tell it to slow down like I always do. He looks at me. His hand moves toward his jacket pocket, like there's something in it, like he's about to—
And then he stops.
Whatever it was, he leaves it in the pocket. He closes his hand over the shape of it and lets it go.
"Good night, Jassy," he manages, and it comes out wrecked, and he walks away before I can ask what he almost did.
THERE WAS A NECKLACEin his pocket.
Maximo had bought it three days ago and had been carrying it around like a live coal ever since, a fine gold thing with a single stone, chosen for the specific girl who would roll her eyes at anything showier and secretly love it forever. He had bought it to say the words he couldn't make his mouth form. He had stood on her threshold with it burning a hole through the wool, close enough to reach up and lay it against her collarbone, close enough to change both their lives.
And then he'd thought of the other necklace. The crooked little star in a dead girl's drawer.
Because how did a man clasp a chain around the throat of the girl wearing his sister's heart? How did he decorate the living proof of what he'd lost and call it love and not grave-robbing? Every good thing he might give Jassy would sit on top of Mary. Every kiss was a theft. Every future he wanted was built on the one his sister would never get.
So he put the necklace back in his pocket, and he walked away from the only door he wanted to stand at, and he told himself it was mercy.
It wasn't mercy. He knew that even then.
It was just the last kind thing he would do before he did the cruelest.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE FILM WRAPS, ANDthere's a party for it, and Ricco Enriquez spends the better part of the night with his hand at the small of my back, telling anyone who will hold still that I'm going to be a star.
It should feel nice. I've mostly lost the ability to feel nice lately, but I remember its shape, so I smile and let him talk.
Across the room, Maximo isn't smiling.
