Page 89 of Rune’s Solace

Of course she’d done it that way. Brenda would’ve carried my secret into the ground if keeping it hadn’t started looking more dangerous than breaking her promise. I could still be hurt by it. Maybe I was. But I couldn’t hate her for being more afraid of burying me than of having me angry with her.

But that wasn’t the part that had me.

“You’ve known for weeks,” I said, and my voice went small, and I hated that it went small but I let it. “You knew the worst thing about me. While I was — while we — ” I pressed my lips together. “You knew, and you never told me you knew. Every night I lay here, you had it, all this time, and you let me think you didn’t.”

“No.” He said it hard, and then, gentler, “No. Let me — please. Let me tell you why, and then if it’s still that, if it’s still the same thing, I’ll take it, I’ll deserve it. But let me say it first.”

I nodded.

He looked down at his hands for a long time before he started.

“When Brenda told me, first thing I wanted to do was come find you.”

I hadn’t expected that.

“Wanted to put my hands on you, tell you I knew and tell you none of it was yours to carry anymore. Wanted you to know there wasn’t one thing you could tell me that’d change how I saw you.” His mouth pulled tight. “Mostly, I wanted to do something with what she’d put in my head, because sitting with it felt about like somebody’d opened me up.”

“Why didn’t you?”

His eyes came back to mine.

“Because you didn’t tell me.”

I went still.

“Wasn’t my story to bring to you, Amy. Wasn’t Brenda’s either, but by then that part was done. Couldn’t unknow it.” He rubbed his palms once over his jeans. “And I kept thinking about what would happen if I walked into your room and said I know.”

I waited.

“You’d lose the telling.”

Something in my chest moved.

Rune kept his eyes on me. “That’s all I could come up with. I already had the knowing. Couldn’t give that back to you no matter how bad I wanted to. But you still had the telling. You still got to decide whether I ever heard those words from you. Tomorrow, ten years from now, never. That part was still yours.”

My eyes started burning.

“So I left it yours.”

For a few seconds, I couldn’t say anything.

“You were going to let me tell you someday,” I finally said.

“If you wanted.”

“And pretend you didn’t know?”

“Wasn’t gonna pretend the part mattered more than you did. I’d listen.”

“Like it was the first time.”

His face changed a little. “For me, it would’ve been.”

I frowned.

“Hearing what happened isn’t the same as you trusting me enough to tell me.”

Oh.