Page 140 of The Breakup Artists

“Let me handle this,” she yells down to her parents. Her dad looks pissed, but her mom says something, and he reluctantly follows her inside.

I turn back to Ella, suddenly aware of how small this balcony is and how close I am to her. I can smell her vanilla shampoo. “There were things I told you that were untrue.”

“Everything,” she interjects, and her tone is barbed.

“Not everything. My name, my mom owning a yacht, and the fact that I like boat shoes... those things were definitely lies. But everything else was true—the stuff about my sister and about my painting, for instance,” I say, and she crosses her arms like I’m going to have to do a lot better than that. “Here’s what I didn’t tell you. My mom’s a painter, a good one, and an often out-of-work one. She’s not fancy. We don’t travel the world or own a mansion. In fact, we barely own a beat-up station wagon. And when my dad left us, my mom kinda fell apart. Stopped paying our bills, stopped cooking dinner, just stopped. And well, my sister, Des, stepped in. She made my school lunches, she made jokes when things got heavy, and when I’d have panic dreams in the middle of the night, she’d lay in my bed until I fell back asleep.” I pause. “She was my rock.”

While Ella doesn’t yet look convinced, she isn’t pushing me off the balcony.

I glance at my hands and back up. “And then Des started dating this guy Kyle. He was charismatic. He was selfish. He was actually a lot like Justin.”

She gives me an evaluating look, like she’s not sure if she should be annoyed.

“Everyone admired him. Even me... until he started pushing her to change, to ‘relax,’ to do things she never did before—drinking, lying, sneaking out.” While I’m certain she gets that I’m drawing a parallel, she doesn’t acknowledge it. “Anyway, he had this sports car that he used to race on a dead-end street near my house.”

Worry pushes her eyebrows together.

“Then one night we got a call that there was an accident. When we got there, the sports car was wrapped around an old oak tree. Kyle said a deer ran into the road and they swerved, losing control. I don’t know,” I say, and as I do, I realize that this is the first time I’ve ever told this story to another person. “All I know is that my sister, the person I loved most in the whole world, was gone. And I was lost.”

She takes a fast breath, and maybe I’m imagining it, but her eyes soften.

“Tiny is the only reason I’m—she saved me. With an idea. That maybe we could help other people, people stuck in relationships who were making choices that could hurt them long term. An idea for a company. And while I understand that you’re probably angry that company exists, much less that you were an unwilling participant in it, I’m not. I don’t regret the jobs we’ve taken, not even yours. I couldn’t save my sister, I didn’t know how, but I’ll be damned if I won’t try to help others. Even when I accidentally fall for the girl I’m attempting to help. Even when she decides she hates me.”

“I don’t need you to save me,” she says.

“I used to agree. But I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not convinced that we don’t all need someone to show up for us in critical moments, take some of the weight off. Sometimes things are too big to conquer on our own, and that’s okay.” I take a breath. “I’ll be the first to admit that I need Tiny. That she’s saved me over and over, that she does it every day when she climbs in my window with an absurd idea and a thoughtful cup of coffee. And if I’m being honest, you saved me, too.”

“Me?” she says, disbelieving.

“I talked to you about things I planned on never talking about again. You made me excited to go to the art store I swore I’d never return to. And more than that, you made me feel something I didn’t know I could.”

“What?” she asks like she doesn’t want to but can’t help herself.

“You made me feel like myself, or rather a version of me that was no longer terrified to care about someone else, a version that cares about you.”

She exhales, annoyed. “Damn it, August.”

My chest swells as I hear my real name on her lips—it sounds better when she says it.

She rubs her hands down her face. “I want to hate you. Like, really hate you. So knock it off.”

I give her a questioning look.

She gestures at me. “That explanation... the, I don’t know, the sincerity.”

“You want me to stop being sincere?”

“Yes, I want you to be exactly the jerk I imagined in my mind so I can make dartboards of your face and write thinly veiled insults about you on my blog,” she says in one breath, because as much as she’s trying to be mad, the edge is gone from her tone.

“If you want, I can help you come up with them. I’m the first to agree that I totally deserve those insults.”

“Shut up, you,” she says, in an attempt to maintain her frustration. “Tell me something—did you or did you not dump that coffee on me on purpose?”

I scratch my eyebrow, wearing a guilty expression.

“Oh my god,” she says with feeling. “I can’t believe I liked someone who spilled coffee on meon purpose.”

“Liked?” I repeat, my stomach doing a flip.