Page 39 of Fool Me

“But I’d had that terrible break-up with Charlie, and Aunt Lydia had been lecturing me about the dangers of men all my life. What Charlie did confirmed what she’d always said. I must have made some subconscious choice not to fall for Grant or even notice how he felt about me.” She pulled in a gooey sniffle as she wiped at the tears coursing down her face, but they were soon replaced by fresh ones. “There was something there between us even that first day we met by accident in his room, but I convinced myself I hadn’t felt it because of Great Aunt Lydia and cheating Charlie!”

“That may be true,” Ginny said, her voice gentle, “but forcing yourself not to have feelings for someone is different from actively loathing them.”

“I didn’t loathe him until he started dating my friends and breaking up with them!”

Ginny’s eyes looked pained as she sucked air in through her teeth. “I don’t think that’s quite right.”

“It is. I'm telling you.” Sadie shrugged out from under Ginny’s arm. “You weren’t there.”

“But he said you wouldn’t even talk to him, and that’s why he dated Trish, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, you talk to everybody. You like everybody. It drives Monique and me crazy sometimes how you do that. If you wouldn’t even talk to him no matter how hard he tried, you must have disliked him right away, or thought you did, and that was months before he’d hurt anybody you care about.”

Sadie scoured the timeline in her head but couldn’t disagree. Shehaddisliked him before he’d dated Trish. She even remembered chiding Trish for going out on her first date with him, calling him a “shallow” business student not good enough for brilliant Trish. “I guess that’s true,” she said to Ginny, “but I don’t know why, because you’re right. I didn’t have to hate him the way I did, and I didn’t have to hold that grudge for all these years either. It’s not like me.”

“Sade, listen,” Ginny said. She reached out and took Sadie’s hands into her own, then gave Sadie a gentle tug so they’d face each other more directly on the couch. “You’ve not been ‘like you’ for a while now, you really haven’t.”

Sadie gaped at her older sister through tear-sparkled eyelashes. “What do you mean?”

Ginny stared at their joined hands as she gave Sadie’s fingers a reassuring squeeze. “You haven’t been yourself since we lost Mom and Dad, and it’s pretty clear you still blame yourself.”

Tears fell again down Sadie’s cheeks, but they were quiet, steady tears now. Resigned, familiar tears. “But Iamto blame. They were on their way home from a graduation party of one of my friends.” She shook her head, her eyes screwed tightly shut. “I wish I’d never graduated.”

“You had to graduate,” Ginny said. “You know you did. The person at fault was the drunk teen who got behind the wheel of that car. Mom and Dad could have been coming from the grocery store or the movie theater or anywhere. Your graduation was a coincidence, nothing more.”

“I know that in my head, but…in my heart…” She gave Ginny’s fingers a return squeeze before pulling her hands away and setting them back in her lap. “What does any of that have to do with Grant and me?”

“Well, Grant isn’t the only guy you decided to dislike in kind of an unfair way after we lost Mom and Dad.”

Sadie tried to think who Ginny could be referring to. “I literally haven’t disliked anyone but Grant.”

“There was Charlie fromRomeo and Juliet.”

Sadie sat up straight in protest. “Charlie? He cheated on me, remember?”

Ginny screwed her mouth sideways, looking nervous to say what she was about to say. “But did he? What I remember is that you broke up with him first.”

“Okay, technically, we were on a break, but still, he didn’t have to?—”

“You told us you were done with him. Monique and I were so confused, because he was trying to be there for you after the car accident, and you just kept shutting him out. Finally, you broke up with him, and then a week later you were furious he was dating that other girl.”

Sadie opened her mouth, but as each potential response formed in her head, she realized it was all lies. She couldn’t refute what Ginny was saying. “So, in other words, I’m an evil person who deserves to be alone the rest of my life.”

Ginny rested her palm on Sadie’s shoulder. “You’re a human being who suffered a sudden, unspeakable loss at a critical time in your life. You blamed yourself to make some sense of it. But, Sade, there is no making sense of it, and you definitely can’t make sense of it by never letting yourself find love. Punishing yourself won’t bring them back.”

“Is that what I’ve been doing?” Sadie said quietly. For a long time, she’d felt like a small animal pacing behind grey, featureless walls that extended into the sky. Had she built those walls herself?

“You haven’t made a single new friend, let alone dated, since you graduated. The only time you leave your house is for work or meeting us at Rick’s. You were the party girl, but lately I'm a social butterfly compared to you.” She shook her head, her jaw tight. “Seriously, sis, that’s not our Sadie. I mean, you really did date half your graduating class—and not only the cute ones. Some of them were, well…woof.”

Sadie tried to smile at the joke, but her lips weren’t in the mood.

Ginny reached both her arms over her sister’s shoulders and pulled Sadie toward her until their foreheads touched. “Monique and I didn’t just lose Mom and Dad that day,” she whispered, her voice breaking, “and we miss you.”

“I miss me too,” Sadie whispered. She allowed herself a long, slow breath in and out, and then another, and another. It was the third breath that filled her with something substantial, something that had been absent a long time, as if this new air had traveled from the core of the Earth, from the core of everything. “I need to let them go, don’t I? I need to accept they’re gone and, whatever role I played, it happened, and I can’t go back and change it. All I can do is go forward the way they’d want me to live.”

“That’s right. And what they’d want is for you to find a love like they had.”

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