Page 70 of A Thousand Little Goodbyes

Instead of answering, Chrissie dug into her purse and pulled out another piece of paper—this one with the name of the Royal Mills Motel emblazoned across the top. Scarlett looked delighted at that, too—that Chrissie, in her fury, would resort to the same tactics thatScarlett had been using all along—but she didn’t care. She was too busy writing underneath River’s line about Kat being lucky to have her.

Stand by your best friend even when she doesn’t deserve it.

“Oooh, nice.” Scarlett nodded at the page. “What else have you got for me?”

Tell her how much you sometimes hate her.

“Hurtful, but fair.”

Be true to yourself even if Scarlett refuses to accept it.

That gave Scarlett a moment’s pause. “What don’t I accept, Chrissie? How much I’m asking of you? How much I’vealwaysasked of you?”

Chrissie felt her eyes flood with tears, but she dashed them away. Hot streaks clung to her cheeks, and she felt sure she’d ruined her mascara, but what did it matter? There weren’t enough martinis in the world to wash away the feeling of despair that was starting to spread outward from her chest, weighing down every movement until she felt like she was swimming through wet cement.

“Ihateplaying the piano, Scarlett. Did you know that? I always have. I can’t sit at the keyboard and not feel that other person inside of me—the twin who never was, the brother I only knew for seven years—taking over.” She held up a hand before Scarlett could say anything. If she didn’t get this out now, she wasn’t sure when—or if—she ever would. “I know you think it’s your fault I gave it up, that without your grandmother’s death or Kat to take care of, I’d have become this world-famous classical pianist traveling the world with you, but it’s not true. The moment I moved out of that house and away from my parents was always going to be the end of that musical road for me.”

“But you were so good.”

“Yeah, because I spent a literaleight thousand hourspracticing. I did the math once. Two hours every single day for eleven years adds up. If my parents had given me a violin or a soccer ball instead, I’d havebeen just as technically proficient at those things. All I wanted was for them to see me the way they saw Malcolm, to open up again after he closed them down, but they either couldn’t or wouldn’t, and I was too young to try any other method. In the end, that’s all I have, Scarlett. Technical proficiency. Without heart, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Chrissie, that’s awful.”

Chrissie rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s awful. I was achild. One who was hurting just as much as they were. But if you think me chaining myself to that same instrument for the next forty years will make up for what you did to me—for what you’re doing to me right now—then you’re just as bad as they are.” She paused, considering. “You know what? It actually makes you worse. Because unlike them, you saw what their indifference did to me.”

“You mean Isavedyou from it.”

All of sudden, the waitress’s removal of the empty glass seemed like a wise move. “I beg your pardon?”

Scarlett’s strange, glinting delight in this conversation was back. “You heard me, Chrissie. I’m the one who saved you from them. I made it possible for you to come to my house after school every single day. I gave you half my grandmother. And then I gave you half my grandmother’s money so you’d never have to go crawling back to them. Say what you want about what I’ve done to you since then, but that means something.”

Chrissie laughed. There was no humor in it, no joy. Just sound and air and the further cracking of a heart that had never been whole to begin with. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that, Scarlett Sanderson?”

“I do, actually. It’s why you love me.” Scarlett folded her hands smugly on the table. “Is the part where wefinallytalk about what’s between us?”

Chrissie should have been prepared for this. From the second she’ddiscovered the truth about this trip, they’d been marching toward this exact conversation, this exact moment in time.

Still. Nothing could have prepared her for the way the chill started seeping through her veins.

“If you’re about to tell me that giving me Kat makes up for all the rest, I’m going to get up from this table, walk out the door, and book the first flight home,” she said in a voice as cold as her blood.

Scarlett’s smirk deepened. “I know she’s been a real pain in the ass lately, but she’ll come around eventually. She’ll break up with a boyfriend or bang her knee in volleyball and go running to her mother to kiss it and make it all better. You’ll forgive her, just like youalwaysforgave me, and then go on to repeat the cycle until you two are the old ladies boarding a steam packet and traveling across all four oceans. You guys can even take my trunk if you want. I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

Chrissie almost did it. She almost pushed back from the table and left her terminally ill friend to find her own way the last four hundred miles to her destination. But one of the ironclad tenets of their relationship was that Scarlett was the one who left.

Chrissie was the one who stayed behind and held things together with every ounce of strength she had.

“That’s the last joke I’ll stand by and listen to you make about dying, so be very careful how you proceed,” Chrissie said in the same tone of voice she used when Kat was being particularly difficult—a thing she often was, because she was very much her mother’s daughter, and because Chrissie loved them both so much that she never tried to quash the indomitable spirit that beat its wings inside them. “I’m going to go with you to Vermont. I’m going to stand by and hold your hand while you do whatever it is you need to do to make peace with your decision. I’ll love you and carry your remains home and inter them next to your grandmother’s—”

But here she had to stop to draw a deep, shuddering breath. Her hands gripped the edge of the table so tightly that she could no longer feel her fingers, but Scarlett sat in shocked silence until she was able to finish.

“I’ll lay you to rest next to that beautiful, kind woman who gave us both so much,” she managed through a throat thick with tears. “And then I’m going to go home and take care ofourdaughter until she no longer needs me. Maybe that’ll only be for a few more years, or maybe it’ll be for the next sixty, but I made a promise and I intend to keep it. If you have a problem withanyof that, that’s too damn bad. My life will never be as big or as glamorous as you want it to be. I won’t become a world-famous pianist. I might never get married. There’s not some secret superpower lurking in my jacked-up, half-twin DNA waiting to be awakened from dormancy. I’m a boring, basic nobody who’s learned to find joy in the simple things, and that’s exactly how I intend to stay. Do you understand all of that?”

“Chrissie, I—”

Chrissie leaned across the table, her fingers still clutching the table. “It’s a yes or no question, Scarlett, and those are the only responses I want to hear. Do. You. Understand?”

Chrissie could see the struggle taking place inside her friend. Scarlett ate one olive. Then another. She fidgeted and squirmed like a toddler trying to stave off naptime. When none of this failed to move Chrissie in the slightest, then and only then did she crash.