Page 91 of Haunted

“At the lake.” He stops. “When you put me on the ground, it was fast, and it didn’t hurt, and I never felt a thing. You could have given him that.”

“He would know how to get out of it.”

“Then you do something else that’s not literally dislocating his shoulder. That’s messed up, Lance. I think you need to talk to someone,” he says. “A professional. I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m scared that being with me is making it worse.” He looks up, and I see that he’s crying. “And right now I feel like I’m losing myself being with you. Like one day I’m going to reach for me and I won’t be there. I’ll just be some phantom that dissolved under the weight of all this.”

“Oh.” I press my head back against the wall.

And the bitterness stacks up in me, and I open my mouth, and I let it fall.

“All this love, you mean. Wow.” I hear it come out of me and I don’t stop it. “I thought you were braver than that.”

“Brave.” His jaw sets. “I moved to a foreign country at eighteen with nothing and built a life. Alone. Nobody there to tell me how to make my bed or wipe my ass. That takes some guts too, you know.”

“Yeah. And how much therapy did you get wandering around Asia?” I hear the sneer in it and I can’t stop that either.

“I didn’t have someone trying to kill me until today, so I didn’t need it.” His voice sounds hard and tired. “I’m not trying to sound ungrateful. But that’s three times you’ve saved me now, and I am not a damsel.”

“You think I’m the only one who ever got damaged by somebody who said they loved me?” I say. “Look at your mother.”

He tips his head at me. “She was trying to hold her family together.”

“And you were never going to get free. Elliott was never going to be able to live on his own. Your grandmother could barely tell which one of you she was talking to.” I can hear where this is going and I go there anyway. “There’s a word for what she did to you. Parentification. And it’s child abuse, Jonny. That’s what it’s called.”

“And what other option did she have? And at least my mother would never have done to me what Nash did to you.”

“She did. Just slower. And with a better excuse.”

I can’t stop it. The filter is gone, and I can feel myself trying to level the ground between us, because if I’m the only damaged one here he will never love me again.

“You weren’t her kid anymore. You were her free childcare, her nurse, her whole support system, and she let you carry it because it was easier than losing it, and it was breaking you, and you still can’t see it. I wish to God you could see it.”

“And you’re breaking me too,” he says. “That’s the thing. I don’t need you to be my backbone. I never needed it.” He turns his hands over. “What is it with you, Lance? Why is it you can give me everything I ask for except the room to be a person?”

“Because when I give you room, you don’t come back.”

It’s out before I can stop it, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all night, and it costs me everything to have said it. My heart feels like it’s slipped its socket. I palm the tears off my face.

“And why do you think that is?” His voice comes up for the first time all night. “You were suffocating me.”

The word goes through me like a nail.

It is the word Nash used. He said it in a kitchen with a glass in his hand and I have never once repeated it to a living soul.

“I was seventeen,” I say. “I was a child and I was hurting too. I was out of my mind because you were in pain and I did not know what to do with any of it.”

“And now manage me. And you almost killed a man in front of me.”

“Yes! Yes, I manage you. I manage you because there is a psycho out there who killed a woman in cold blood and could have killed you just as easily that first day. Maybe he killed Alice thinking it was you. It was foggy, it was bad lighting, and he had an opportunity. Maybe that’s why it happened. But until he is safely behind bars for what he did, the only objective is to make sure he doesn’t hurt you. I’m not asking to be this forever,” I say. “I’m asking for a few weeks. Until they’ve charged him. Then I stand down, I swear to God, and you can have every inch of room there is—”

“And then what?” He isn’t shouting. That’s the worst of it. “Then it’s the trial. Then it’s my father. Then it’s whatever comes after that, because something always comes after that.” He looks up at me. “There is never going to be a day when nothing is wrong, Lance. My whole childhood was somebody telling me it would be easier next year.”

“That’s not—”

“And you already know how to do this,” he says. “You did it for eight years. You stood shoulder to shoulder with people and trusted them to hold their own side of it.”

“That’s different. They were trained.”

“There it is.” It sounds like he’s just uncovered something.