Page 31 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
Now the part you're really going to hate.
Don't build me a museum, Max. Don't lock my door and dust my things and turn me into a rule you live by. And whatever you do, if they use anything of mine, if some stranger out there ends up with a piece of me keeping them alive, don't go find them. And if you go find them anyway because you're you, then don't you dare try to make them into me.
Because here's the truth, big brother, and I need you to really hear it: my heart won't be mine anymore. It'll belong to the one who lives.
Let it. Let them live. Promise me you'll let them have a whole loud life, and you'll go have one too.
Smile. Your face won't crack. I checked.
Love, M.
Maximo sat very still with the page in both hands, on the floor of the museum his sister had begged him not to build.
She had forgiven him before he'd ever had the chance to earn it. For the gentle no in the front hall, for the door she slammed and the car she should never have been driving in the rain that upset, for the phone call that cut his life in half on an ordinary afternoon. Two years of a verdict she had reached up out of the ground to try to overturn, and he had never once opened the envelope that would have done it.
And then he had gone looking for the one who lived, the exact thing she'd told him not to do, and he'd found her, and she'd turned out to be loud and alive and impossible not to love. And when a second girl held her whole heart out to him,the very same heart,he had done the cruelest thing in reach because he was too much of a coward to survive being loved by a girl again.
He had tried to hand Jassy back the dead. And when she wouldn't take them, when all she'd done was live, exactly as instructed, he had punished her for it. In Mary's name. With Mary's own heart beating scared and sorry in her chest.
He folded the letter along its two-year creases, and he understood that his sister had known him better dead than he had ever managed to know himself alive.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I SEE HIM ON A TUESDAY, in a break room, on a muted television I'm not even watching.
The film's doing well. Well enough that I'm doing press now, which is how I come to be sitting in a green room in a city that still doesn't feel like mine, half-listening to a business channel nobody chose, when the picture cuts to an interview and my whole body knows him before my brain catches up.
Maximo.
On a screen. In a suit. Being asked about mergers and markets and whatever it is men like him get asked, and answering in that voice, and I lunge for the remote and turn the sound on like a woman possessed because I haven't seen his face in months and I'm apparently still exactly this pathetic about it.
"—one more question, if you'll indulge us. You're famously private. Any regrets you'd share?"
He's quiet for a second. I know that second. I've watched him hold a hundred words behind his teeth in that exact second.
"One," he answers.
"Just one?"
"One that matters." He looks straight down the barrel of the camera, and I swear the man is looking at me, all the way across the country, through a muted TV in a room he'll never see. "There was someone who deserved my gratitude. The deepestgratitude I've ever owed anyone. And instead of giving it to her, I made her feel like she owed me for existing." His jaw works. "She's gone now. That's mine to live with. But if she ever hears this...she was never the debt. She was the gift. I had that exactly backwards, and it cost me the only thing I've ever been afraid to lose."
The host says something. I don't hear it.
My hand's gone up over my mouth without checking with me first. There's a paper cup of somebody's coffee going cold in the other one and I've got no memory of picking it up. I sit in a green room three thousand miles from him and watch the most guarded man I've ever known apologize to me on national television without ever once saying my name, and I think, clear as anything, you stubborn, impossible man. You waited until I couldn't answer you to finally say it out loud. And the worst part, the part that undoes me right there under the fluorescent lights, is that a year of fine comes apart all at once, and I understand that I never stopped. Not for one day. Not for one beat of a heart I was never even supposed to have.
Chapter Thirty-Five
THEY CALL MY NAME,and the world goes to static.
I don't remember standing, or the stairs, or the statue, heavier than it has any right to be, or the wall of light where a thousand faces should be. I remember gripping the podium like it's the only solid thing left on earth, and I remember promising myself that if this impossible thing ever happened, I'd say the one true thing and nothing else.
"I wasn't supposed to be here," I tell the room.
It goes quiet.
"I don't mean that in the cute way. I mean I have somebody else's heart. Two years ago a girl I never got to meet died, and she was young, and she was loved, and some part of her decided that a total stranger should get to keep going." My voice wobbles. I let it. "So I don't really get to take credit for a single beat of what's standing up here. Everything I am, everything I get to become, I'm borrowing from a girl who ran out of time to become it herself."
Somewhere in all that light, a person I can't see makes a sound I feel more than hear.
