Page 91 of Sweet Sacrifice (King's Trace Antiheroes 3)

My stomach cramps, my brain hyper-focused on what I shouldn’t do, thoughts of inhaling the sweet smoke taking over until I forcibly shove it from my mind, trying to find something else to give my attention to.

“What’re you doing out here?” I ask, curling my fingers around the white stick.

“Same thing as you. Trying to relieve myself of my regrets.”

“How’s that working out?”

He laughs. “I don’t know, ask me again three cigarettes from now.”

A comfortable silence falls around us, the calm after the chaos of today—thinking we’d lost Kieran, my secret breakup with Boyd, my mother starting her day out well and progressively getting worse as the hours dragged by, like they were sucking the remainder of her life out along with it.

It’s the kind of calm you only get before everything goes bad again—a serene blip in time, before the universe chucks more hurdles at you.

“I broke things off with Chelsea,” he notes after a while, flicking ash to the ground. “Switched her to a different department, too.”

Nodding, I mull this over. “Are you gonna tell Mom?”

“I don’t know, Fi. I’m not sure I want to risk the last memory she has of me being a bad one. You know what she always says about that.”

“Those are the ghosts that come back to haunt you,” I mutter, a soft smile splaying across my lips as I recite one of her many mantras. My stomach twists painfully, my mind flickering to how Boyd’s last thought of me will forever be of him taking my virginity and me telling him he needs to get his life together.

“You’re just like her, you know?” I raise an eyebrow, and he nods, taking another drag. “So similar that sometimes I wonder if we didn’t accidentally clone you.”

Scoffing, I stay silent, pinching the end of the cigarette in my hand so I’m no longer tempted. Controlling what I can. “That what caused the rift between us?”

“No.” Glancing at me from the corner of his eye, he shrugs. “I was drawn to your mother because she didn’t want anything to do with me. She was strong and self-sufficient, and it… relaxed me, because I knew she’d never need me to take care of her. Would never want me to. And then we had you after your monstrous brothers, and all you wanted to do was take charge, just like her. You were always so much braver than the rest of us.”

“I don’t know about that,” I mutter after a moment. “Most of the time I wallow in my fears.”

He shakes his head, pointing at me. “People who are afraid don’t spend their lives taking care of others. They cower and let other people take the reins, hoping that if they’re quiet, disappointment will forget about them.”

A knot lodges in my throat at his comparison, because right now I don’t feel particularly brave. I feel defeated.

“I shouldn’t have let you take care of her all this time by yourself,” he says, sighing, and something inside of my chest pinches tight at the weight of his words, a boulder shoving farther in place, because I can’t deny it. “I should’ve been there for both of you. That’s not the kind of thing a kid should have to go through alone. But I let fear rule, and it fractured us and stole what little time I had left with your mother. I have to live with that.”

Wiping beneath his eyes, emotion hanging thick on the edges of his eyelashes, he takes another drag, shaking his head as he gazes up at the stars.

“When you fall in love, you never think about what your life will be like if they’re suddenly taken from you one day,” he says. “I still don’t know if I’m ready to face that day. What’s the point of existing when the part of you that matters is gone?”

I open my mouth to tell him about my mother’s wishes, about how she wants things to be forcefully ended before she gets to a point where she can’t ever recover, but the words don’t come.

I don’t tell him how we’ve planned the date for her birthday in September, or that I can’t stop feeling like my heart is being torn to shreds when I think about losing her.

I don’t mention the anxiety it gives me, how it drove me into the arms of his employee. My brother’s best friend, who I might have damaged irrevocably, when all I wanted to do was fix him.

Fix myself.

I don’t mention that I wish he would tell my mom about his affair, that I think he deserves to be haunted—honestly, I think he knows that anyway. It’s probably why he’s sitting out here chain-smoking after being clean for decades.

‘I have to live with that.’

Guilt eats away at your strengths, breaking down each wall you’ve erected, and necrotizing things from the inside. It’s evil, worming its way into your bloodstream and making a home in your veins, manifesting in a million different ways.

Maybe it’s a bad habit. Maybe it’s a tic. Maybe it’s your secrets.

Whatever the case, it exists inside all of us, a tidal wave crashing against the shore of sanity, robbing us of the beauty of life.

And as angry as I might be at my father for what he did, I don’t want to add to his pain.

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