Page 28 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
That's when my knees buckle.
And I crash to the floor.
And I can no longer keep the tears from falling.
I loved him. I love him still. But now I know I have to stop.
I have to.
There's no way I can keep loving him when his heart...and my heart...
It all belongs to Mary.
I'm so, so sorry.
Never mine.
I'm sorry, Mary. Never will be.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
MAXIMO DROVE UNTILthe tank complained, and then he drove some more, and when he finally came back it was the ugly hour before dawn and every window in the penthouse was dark.
Good, he told himself. She's asleep. She'll have cried it out. In the morning she'll be furious, and furious he could survive; furious meant a fight, and a fight meant she was still here to have it.
He let himself in without a sound, braced for the wreckage. There wasn't any. That was the first wrong thing.
He stood in the entryway and listened to his own home and couldn't place, at first, what was missing. Then he had it, and it went through him colder than anything he'd said.
The silence.
Not the old silence, the one he had lived inside for two years, the one he had built the rules to protect. A new silence, the shape of a girl who wasn't singing in the shower or heckling the television or laughing on a kitchen floor she wasn't supposed to sit on. The apartment had learned her noise. Now the noise was gone, and the quiet it left behind had edges.
She's calming down,he told himself, standing in the dark.This is what calming down sounds like.
He almost believed it.
He went to bed telling himself it, and he lay awake telling himself it, and somewhere down the hall he could hear thesmallest sounds, a drawer, a zipper, the careful movements of someone trying not to wake anyone.
He told himself that was calming down too.
It wasn't calming down.
Down the hall, in a room he had let her fill with her whole ridiculous life, the girl with his sister's heart was folding that life back into two small suitcases, and Maximo lay in the dark and listened to it happen and did the last unforgivable thing. Nothing.
He did nothing because he was a coward, and because some cruel private part of him thought the silence would keep. That she'd keep. That a girl who loved that loudly couldn't possibly, actually, leave.
He was wrong about that too.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
MAXIMO LEFT BEFOREshe woke because morning hadn't made him any braver.
He told himself he'd fix it that night, rehearsing it between meetings he didn't hear. The apology, the truth, the whole ugly shape of what he'd done. There would be Mary, all of it, the alley and the file and the six thousand miles. There would be the confession that he'd been drowning and had grabbed the nearest cruel thing to hold himself under, and the smaller one about a necklace he'd lost his nerve to give. He had all day to build the speech, and he built it well, and he drove home that night half believing he'd get to say it.
The apartment told him the truth before he had his coat off.
No lights. No television. No terrible pop song bleeding out from under a door. He walked through his own home calling a name that didn't live there anymore, and he knew before he reached her room, he knew, but he opened the door anyway.
