Page 27 of Sweet Oblivion

But I swallowed that back, unwilling to share that piece of information. I worried it was why my mom had become so emotionally distant and my dad refused to be near me. I hated where those thoughts led, to the place where it was my fault Lev was dead, that my family was broken.

“Lev...” I bit the inside of my cheek. No one knew this part of the story. Not my parents. Not the police. Definitely not the press.

She laid her hand on my chest, right over my pounding heart. “Whatever you tell me, Nash, will always be between us. Just us. I promise.”

I inhaled. Aya promised.

Just us.

Lev used to say that, but in a different context. “It’s just us, brother. Porters against the world.” And we’d fist bump.

I should have hugged Lev more. I should have told him how much he meant to me.

“He took a bunch of my mom’s pills,” I said, the words rushing out, tumbling over each other, like the waves at the beach. “Or maybe my dad’s. I don’t know. He was really out of it.” I huffed.

“He did it in front of them, but they didn’t notice—they just kept fighting. Mom knocked the phone from Dad’s hand. It ended up...”

Next to Lev.

That’s when shit really went south.

“Lev grabbed it and made a beeline for the dock. I thought he’d throw the phone in the lake.”

I didn’t have to tell Aya that I lived right on the water—that was the best address, the most expensive piece of real estate in an overpriced market. And the Syads and the Porters had the best of everything. Plus, she’d been there.

“My dad ran after him, telling Lev to give him back his phone.”

My father had been texting another woman. A woman he never met because of Lev’s death. In that, Lev got his wish.

“Lev yelled no, that he wouldn’t give back the phone and our dad should actually listen to our mom. That he should stop banging random chicks. Dad was too slow. I was too slow.”

I swallowed.

“Lev jumped out into the water. We weren’t supposed to do that, not at night, but he couldn’t have been thinking straight. He was so fucking high.” I gulped. “He must have tripped. He just…”

Aya wrapped her free arm around my biceps, tugging my whole arm against her pillowy chest. Reliving that night was the deepest hell, one I typically refused to acknowledge.

Maybe that’s why it took me a full minute to realize I was crying. Aya dropped my arm and pulled me into her embrace. I pressed my nose against the juncture of her shoulder and neck. I sobbed and blubbered and shook as the loss of Lev rolled over me, pulling me under, not unlike the lake that later spat my brother’s limp, broken body onto the shore.

“He was my best friend,” I gasped, my entire body shuddering.

And that was the real reason I’d kept Hugh at arm’s length. He wasn’t Lev. Neither was Aya. No one could replace my big brother.

Aya said nothing. She held me, rocking as my sobs grew in intensity. Once I calmed some, she said, “That’s why you were so worried about me—all those years ago. You’d been taught to be careful in the water.”

“Always.”

She nodded, and I liked the feel of her silk hair shifting against my skin.

“Are you ready to finish it?”

I licked my lips, tasting the wetness of my tears—or maybe remembering the water on my face.

“Our neighbor heard the yelling, I guess. He came out, he called the cops, he pulled me out of the water before…before…”

Before I drowned, too. Because I wouldn’t have stopped searching.

“He’s the guy you talk to?”

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