Page 7 of The Promises We Broke
"How's the pain?" Xander asked, slipping into his doctor voice. "Scale of one to ten."
"Three," I lied. It was closer to a six, but I'd lived with worse. Pain was familiar. Pain was what I deserved.
He raised an eyebrow, clearly not buying it. "The prescription is for a reason, Gage. There's no virtue in suffering unnecessarily."
Wasn't there? For eleven years, suffering had been my closest companion. It had kept me moving, kept me from getting too comfortable anywhere, and from forgetting what I'd done. Without it, who was I?
"I'm fine," I said, taking another spoonful of soup. "Really."
"Bullshit." The word came out flat, matter of fact. "You've been carrying around guilt for a decade over something that wasn't your fault. You disappeared without a word, leaving all of us wondering if you were alive or dead. You've been living like a ghost, taking dangerous jobs and refusing to form connections because you've convinced yourself you don't deserve happiness. And now you're here, broken and hurting, still trying to minimize your needs because you think you're not worth taking care of."
The accuracy of his assessment hit me like a physical blow. I set down the spoon, my appetite suddenly gone.
"I know what that's like," Xander continued quietly. "The guilt. The self-punishment. The certainty that you're irredeemably broken and everyone would be better off without you."
I looked up at him then, really looked, and saw something in his expression I recognized. The haunted look of someone who'd been to hell and back, who'd learned things about himself he'd rather not know.
"Alcoholism," he said simply. "Lost my practice, my whole self-identity, nearly lost my family. I was convinced for a year that I was poison to everyone I touched. That I could never beenough. So I found my solace in the bottom of a bottle with a heavy side of denial that I didn't actually have a problem."
I'd known Xander had struggled, but I hadn't known the extent of it. The brother I remembered had been brilliant, driven, destined for greatness. To learn that he'd fallen so far...
"What changed?" I asked.
"I was in an accident." He smiled at me ruefully then, his gaze flickering down to my busted leg. "I could have really hurt someone. It all came out and I hit rock bottom. Then I forced myself to pull my ass out of it. Went to rehab, eventually ended up back here. And then there was Blake." His face softened at the mention of her name. "And Amelia. And realizing that punishing myself wasn't actually helping anyone. That the people who loved me wanted me to heal, not suffer."
He leaned forward, his expression intense. "We all told you the truth yesterday about Regina, about what really happened. But I don't think you heard it. Not really. So I'm going to say it again. You were seventeen years old, being manipulated by someone who'd had decades of practice destroying people. She threatened our family if you didn't cooperate. You were a kid trying to protect the people you loved, and she used that against you."
"I still made the choice," I said stubbornly. "I still…"
"You made the choice a scared teenager would make when backed into a corner by someone who held all the power." Xander's voice was firm but gentle. "That doesn't make you a villain, Gage. It makes you human."
The words hung in the air between us, and I so desperately wanted to believe them. But eleven years of self-hatred weren't easily dismantled by a single conversation, no matter how much I wanted them to be.
"Speaking of healing," Xander said, his tone shifting slightly, "how are you feeling about working with Billie? I know last night was... intense."
Last night. The memory hit me like a physical blow. Her walking into that living room and seeing her for the first time in eleven years. The way the whole family had melted away, leaving us alone in a bubble of tension so thick I could hardly breathe. The way she'd looked at me like I was a stranger, like the boy she'd once loved had died the night I left.
Maybe he had.
"I don't know," I admitted, pushing my hands through my hair. "I mean, I know she's good at her job. The best, apparently. But Xander... seeing her again..."
I trailed off, not sure how to put into words what that moment had done to me. How it had felt to look into those cornflower blue eyes and see walls where there had once been infinite trust. How it had felt to hear her voice, professional and careful, when the last time I'd seen her she'd whispered my name like a prayer.
"It's going to be torture," I said finally. "Being that close to her, having her touch me during therapy, pretending like we're just patient and therapist when we used to be..." I swallowed hard. "When I used to..."
"Used to?" Xander asked quietly.
The question hung between us, loaded with implications I wasn't ready to examine. Because the truth was, seeing Billie again had made one thing devastatingly clear. I'd never stopped loving her. Eleven years of distance, eleven years of trying to convince myself I'd done the right thing by leaving, eleven years of telling myself she was better off without me. All it took was one look at her face and it had undone it all.
I was still completely, hopelessly, desperately in love with Billie Schulster.
"I don't have the right," I said instead. "I gave that up when I left. When I broke her heart without explanation. When I disappeared like a coward instead of fighting for what we had. Instead of finally admitting how we felt and…"
I shook my head. We'd been teenagers back then. Back when friendship had turned into something so much more. It felt like I had all the time in the world to take the plunge, to tell her how I really felt. And then that night happened. In one single moment, Regina destroyed it all.
"Maybe," Xander said carefully. "Or maybe you were a seventeen-year-old kid who made a terrible decision under impossible circumstances. Maybe you've paid for that mistake for eleven years, and maybe it's time to forgive yourself and fix your attention back on the life you wanted. The life that was stolen from you."
Forgive myself. The concept felt foreign, impossible. I'd built my entire identity around the certainty that I didn't deserve forgiveness, that I didn't deserve love, never mind a second chance at happiness.
