Page 32 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
"I know your name now," I say to her, only to her, to the heart doing its brave work behind my ribs. "And I'm going to spend the rest of the life you gave me trying to be worth it. Thank you. Thank you for the extra time. I promise I won't waste a beat of it."
I don't thank anyone else. There are people you thank at a podium and people you carry off the stage, and the one I'd have thanked most, once, is a wound I don't get to name out loud.
But as they walk me into the wings, blinking, shaking, clutching my little gold proof that a broke girl with a borrowed heart made good, I finally find the one who made that sound.
Third row. Aisle seat. A man in a perfect suit, one hand pressed hard over his mouth, holding himself together by sheer will. The most controlled face I've ever loved is coming apart behind that hand. Not crying. Men like him don't get to. Just wrecked, silent, for his sister, and for me, and for the two of us he broke.
And nobody else in that whole bright theater has the first idea that they're watching a single heart get handed, gently, back and forth between the only three people it ever belonged to.
Chapter Thirty-Six
HE'S AT THE STAGE DOORon opening night, and I walk right past him.
I've earned a play, somehow. A real one, a black-box theater with good bones and eight shows a week and my name down in the program, and every single night when I come out the back into the alley, he's there.
He never rushes me, never grabs my arm or steps into my path or does one single thing I could hold against him. He just stands across the alley in the cold with his hands in his pockets, and he says my name, once, like a question, and I get into my cab like the question was in a language I don't speak.
I do that for two weeks.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and I've had my chest sawed open on an operating table, so I know the field. Every single night my whole traitor body wants to cross that alley. Every night the girl who forgives too fast, who forgave a mother who chose the stepdad, who forgives everybody for everything, stands at the mouth of a dark alley and makes herself get in the cab instead because forgiving him fast is exactly what wrecked me the first time, and I promised the heart in my chest I'd be braver with it than that. It doesn't get easier. It gets to be a thing I survive one cab door at a time.
Then it rains.
Not the pretty kind. The mean kind, the kind that means it, and I push out the back door already digging for my umbrella and there he is, standing in the middle of it. No car. No umbrella. Soaked clean through, hair plastered to his head, looking like he's been standing in that alley since long before the sky opened, like he intends to keep standing there until the weather or the wanting finishes the job.
And the thing in me that's held for a year, for two years, for a whole loud lonely life of holding, finally just...lets go.
I stop.
I turn around in the middle of the alley with the rain hiding my tears in it, and I look at the most stubborn man on this earth standing in a storm for a girl he threw away, and I say the first words I've said to him in a year.
"You're going to catch your death out here." "Then I'll catch it here," he tells me, not moving an inch. "Outside your door. I'll catch it right here, Jassy, every night, for as long as it takes."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
"DON'T," I TELL HIM, before he can start. "If you're about to explain it away, don't. I'd rather stand here in the rain."
"I'm not going to explain it." Water runs off his jaw. He doesn't wipe it. "There's no version of what I said to you that has an excuse under it. I looked for one for a year. There isn't one."
I wasn't ready for that. I'd braced for the smooth thing, the powerful-man thing, the reasons all lined up in a row. Not a man standing in a storm agreeing with the worst thing I've ever thought about myself.
"Then why," I ask, and my voice cracks right down the middle of the word. "You don't get to wreck me and then just stand in the rain looking sorry, Maximo. Tell me why."
"Because I was a coward." He says it plainly, the way you read a verdict off a page you've already read a hundred times. "Because when Mary died I built a room out of rules and I moved into it, and it was safe in there, and it was killing me by inches, and I liked it. Then you walked into a diner and started inventing rules of your own, and you dragged me out of that room without even knowing the room was there, and I couldn't forgive you for it."
"For being alive," I whisper.
"For making me want to be."
And that's the thing I can't hold in one more second, the question that's been eating a hole clean through me for a year, so I let it out right there in the storm.
"I don't understand." I hate how young it comes out, how small. "I spent this whole year sure I'd finally worked it out. That she was never really your sister at all. That she was the one you loved, the one you lost, and I had the nerve to walk in wearing her actual heart and fall for you anyway. That every day I stayed I was some cheap stand-in for a dead woman you'd never stop loving, living on her heart, reaching for her man. And you let me. So tell me the truth, whatever it is. The version I built for myself nearly finished me."
Something goes through him, and I watch it cost him to hold my eyes.
"You had it backwards. All of it, and that part's on me too." He crosses the last of the distance he swore he'd never cross, careful, like I'm something that might still run. "She wasn't the girl I loved, Jassy. She was my sister. Not by blood. My father married her mother the year I turned twenty-four, and a nine-year-old with a crooked-star necklace walked in and appointed me her brother before I got a vote. But that is all she ever was to me, in every way that counts. A sister. I loved her like one and only ever like one."
The rain comes down between us and I can't make a single sound.
