Page 91 of Near Miss

I stretch my hands out, and I study my fingers, pink against the fall air—hands that might be the biggest hypocrites of all, that somehow take life and give life all at once—and I feel a hand much bigger than mine brush over the back, a finger hooking against my pinky, and I hear it.

Promise me you’ll think about telling her. As long as it’s right for you.

Looking back up at my sister, sitting here in front of me—healthy and whole with no evidence that her skull was fractured once upon a time and her pancreas hung in tatters in her abdomen.

She looks like nothing ever touched her. Whole. No empty pieces left over from where she carved something vital out of herself. My voice cracks. “Do you ever think about the car accident? What happened after?”

Her eyebrows knit, lips pulling to the side as she chews on the inside of her cheek before answering. “Yes. But I don’t think it’s quite like you do.”

“Why do you think that is?” I whisper, and I really do want to know—I think I’d like to be as unburdened as my sister seems.

Stella takes a measured exhale. “I had time to heal. When my body was stitching itself back together, so was my mind. And it got to stay that way.”

The last words catch in her throat, and it hangs between us—the empty space of me.

I inhale, squeezing my eyes shut before looking at her. “Sometimes—most times, actually—I wish I could go back in time. We were so young, and I know—I know he got sober, and we got to have this beautiful thing and a second chance with him that most people don’t get. But sometimes, I wish...”

My words fall into nothing, and I think they might plummet into that all that emptiness—but maybe they land on the ground, on all that soil with all those beautiful things peeking through the dirt, and it’s a safe place for them.

Because even if she doesn’t, can’t, won’t understand—someone did.

I blink up at my sister, inhaling and shoulders shuddering when I finally, finally tell her. “I wish I said no. I wish it wasn’t me.”

Stella pulls her head back, her eyes go wide, and I think tears pool along her lash line, but she keeps waiting.

“I wish I didn’t have to. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t forgiven him for what he did our entire lives and what he did when he got behind the wheel. I didn’t want him to die, but if I could go back in time to right before and someone said to me it doesn’t have to be you, but someone else needs to die for that to happen, I think I would have said yes. How fucked up is that?” I watch the steam still rise off my coffee, and I grab it without thinking, tapping mythumb on the plastic lid before I finally look back at her. “And then I just became this person who takes the way something was taken from me. What if the people I’m operating on felt like me? It’s not like I have a chance to ask. What if all the car accidents—”

She shakes her head and leans forward, stilling my fingers and gripping them in her hand. “You shouldn’t have had to do it.”

My heart and my brain both screech to a halt. For once, I think everything in me goes silent. Because there it is. This thing I’ve been waiting to hear from someone else my whole life. But they whir back to life, because it’s all we’ve ever known. I start to shake my head. “You weren’t a match.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Stella whispers. “I wasn’t a match. You were. But that doesn’t mean you should have had to do it. This is a fact, Greer. You shouldn’t have had to give a piece of yourself away so someone else could be whole. We never should have been in the situation to begin with.”

“But we were.”

She nods softly. “We were. And you did an impossibly hard thing. You were brave again after a lifetime of being brave. You gave something to him—” Her voice breaks and she squeezes my fingers. “You gave something to me. And maybe we haven’t given enough back to you. You felt empty, and instead of talking about that, giving it life, filling you back up the way we should have, we just skirted around the entire thing. And I’m sorry for that.”

It feels nice against my skin, her apology, her acknowledgement. But it’s not a miracle. “Do you ever think about how we—I don’t know—you spend all day with people like our dad, and then I’m walking around with livers and kidneys in my hands that don’t belong to me?”

“Sure,” she agrees, squeezing my fingers before letting go and leaning back in her chair. “Addiction is a cycle. We know that. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think it means thateither of us are just continuing to give away pieces of ourselves to this disease we were never going to win against. Maybe some days it looks like that. But other days we’re compassionate, and kind, and we understand someone in a world that doesn’t. Healing isn’t simple and it’s not linear. You aren’t going to wake up one day with the knots of all these complicated feelings untangled.”

“I don’t want to be this person who doesn’t leave enough for themselves. I don’t want to—”

Stella holds up a hand, cutting me off.

“I’m not qualified to operate and fix people the way you do. But I am qualified to tell you this.” My sister leans forward, and somehow, she’s both the fifteen-year-old I was desperate to save and this fully-fledged adult who knows so much more than me. “Somewhere along the way, you’ve confused setting a boundary with closing yourself off.”

“Have you been talking to Rav?” I ask through a wet laugh.

“Sure.” Stella shrugs, waving her hand in the air, silver rings adorning her fingers catching in the afternoon sunshine. “We trade case notes on your file.”

I smile softly. “I’ll be sure to report you both to your various governing bodies.”

“So, this is it? The big secret reason you want to be alone?” She blinks, lips tugging to the side with a small exhale. “I’m not minimizing, but as far as I can tell, Beckett Davis isn’t asking for one of your organs.”

Except that there is this piece of me I think he wants. It sits in my chest, where it beats and keeps me alive.

“I’m not sure it’s that easy,” I whisper.