Page 65 of Am I the Only One

I pull out a pair of pajamas but don’t have it in me to change as I stare blankly out the window.

“Hey.”

When I turn around, Luca steps into the room, closing the door behind him.

“Are you okay?”

Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just tired.

It’s my automatic response, and the words are on my tongue, yet I don’t say them. This time, I don’t push Luca away. With my heart in shreds, I shake my head.

I’m not okay, and I don’t know if I can go another day pretending that I am.

Emma

These past two days in Tennessee have been great. Luca held true to his word with Matthew, taking him to the airport where my brother got to meet a pilot who had just finished a twelve-hour shift. Luca slipped the man some money on the sly to visit with my brother. The four of us sat at a coffee shop next to the security entrance while Matthew chatted the man’s ear off. The pilot even gave Matthew the real wings from his uniform. When I told him that the plastic ones would be just fine, he insisted, saying that he had a few extras for backup.

We even went to the mall so Luca could buy Matthew a pair of jeans with holes in them. He wore them out of the store, and I laughed at the two of them, walking around in their matching jeans, twinning like it was the coolest thing. It’s comforting to see my brother bonding with my best friend, and I’m so grateful that I didn’t push Luca away when he asked to come on this trip. Because he was right all along; I do need to involve Matthew in my life more. After watching the two of them these past few days, I hope they will continue to keep in touch after we go back to DC.

Since Luca cannot miss his classes tomorrow, we have to wake up and hit the road early in the morning. My brother doesn’t do well in the mornings, so we decided that instead of battling to wake him up in the middle of the night to drop him off, we would just say our goodbyes and take him back to Valley Crest tonight.

But my peace about the situation quickly vanished during lunch when Matthew started to insist that I take him to go to our parents’ gravesite. Neither one of us have been there since the day of the funeral. As many times as I’ve come back to see Matthew over the past year, I’ve never gone, and if he brought it up, I was always quick to make an excuse as to why we couldn’t go. This time, my rebuttals are shot down when Luca agrees before I can stop him.

Now I sit in Luca’s car, my stomach in knots as I stare out the window and into the sea of headstones. This is the last thing I want to be doing, and I just want it to be over with.

“Come on, Matthew,” I say as I open my car door.

Luca looks over his shoulder at me as I get out of the backseat. “I’ll wait here for you guys.”

My brother and I step out of the car, and it takes me a moment to conjure the courage to move my feet. All too soon, they move, leading us over to the plot my mom and dad share.

Matthew spots it first. “Ashford! There it is!”

His enthusiasm contradicts my misery, and I slowly trail behind him as he rushes over to the headstone that wasn’t here when they were buried. Seeing it for the first time knocks the wind out of my lungs, preventing me from taking another step closer.

“Look, Emma. It has their names on it,” Matthew calls out as he traces his fingers along the etched letters.

I take a few steps more, crunching snow beneath my feet as I do.

Matthew turns to me with glassy eyes. “Where are they, Emma?”

His question steals the breath from my lungs, and I realize that he truly expected to see them. I want to protect him, tell him a lie so that I don’t have to hurt him with the truth.

But there is no lie to tell.

They’re dead.

“They’re buried,” I force around the knot in my throat, but it does nothing for the confusion that remains in his eyes.

“Where?”

My chin begins to quiver, and I wish I were the one who was confused, who didn’t fully understand, because living in complete awareness of the unvarnished truth is agonizingly painful.

He sees grief at its purest trembling through me. “Why are you sad?”

“Because I miss them,” I weep as tears fill his eyes.

“Where are they?”

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