Page 149 of Time Stops With You

She meets my eyes. “I like your scars.”

“Really?”

“I have a few of my own.”

I want to ask to see them, but she speaks first, “Why did you pass out that day, Cullen?”

I look down. This woman is like a dog with a bone. “I had chest pain.”

“Chest pain? So it’s different from your lungs, right? It has nothing to do with your… with illness?”

I choose my words carefully. “The lungs aren’t that far from the chest. One can impact the other and, unfortunately, that’s the case for me.”

She chews on her bottom lip. “Were you alone? In the hospital?”

I pause.

“The first time you were diagnosed,” Nardi clarifies.

I breathe in relief. “Yes.”

“Where were your parents?”

“Gone,” I say simply.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s life.”

“Were you close to them?”

“My mom was a saint,” I say, taking a seat. Standing this long is making the room spin. “She was kind and quiet. Always ready to help without expecting anything in return. But one summer, she got sick and she sent me to live with my dad. They were divorced and I rarely saw him. So I was excited to live with him.”

I don’t know why I’m telling Nardi this, but the words won’t stop coming.

“I shouldn’t have had such high expectations. Especially when I saw that his house looked like a pig sty. He had a drinking problem. The guy was mean sober, but he was frightening when he was drunk.”

“Did he hit you?” Nardi asks, crouching in front of me.

I can’t stand to see her uncomfortable like that, so I start to get off the chair, offering for her to take it instead of me.

To my surprise, Nardi crawls into my lap.

“Don’t stare at me like that, Cullen. I’m declaring a truce because you look like you can use a hug. Don’t worry. I’ll go right back to hating you when you finish your story. Now tell me what happened with you and your dad.”

My heart is beating fast and I scramble to hold on to the unpleasant memories when I’d rather focus on the present. Nardi feels soft in my arms and she smells like the shampoo and conditioner I used.

I nuzzle my nose in her hair. “When I was six or seven, my mom told me that my dad wanted to be a computer engineer when he was young. I didn’t know what those words meant at the time, but I decided that’s what I was going to be.”

Nardi laughs softly and her nail traces over my scar.

“But when I went to live with him, I realized that dad wasn’t a computer engineer. He never made it past the first month of college because my mom got pregnant with me and he dropped out. Then my mom divorced him for her own reasons.” I shake my head. “The point is, he didn’t like seeing my interest incomputers. He didn’t like that I was good at it. And he hated being reminded of his past failures. He made sure to tell me all of this when he was drunk.”

Nardi frowns.

“He told me that I was nothing special.” I lift my chin because those words still scrape against my soul. “That I would die a failure just like him. He said that was our family curse.”

Nardi’s hands are on my face in an instant. She presses her soft palms into my cheeks. “You know that’s a lie, don’t you?”

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