Page 131 of Your Fault

I clenched my teeth.

“Now I realize he was right…because Noah loved you for real, Nicholas, but you couldn’t love her back… You couldn’t love me, you couldn’t forgive your parents, and you certainly won’t be able to love her because you know she’s better than you in every way.”

“Briar, where is Noah?”

I couldn’t believe this was blowing up in my face again. Briar had no idea what I had been through and how every single day, I’d regretted what my father had forced her to do.

Briar was one of many girls I’d hooked up with, and she was never supposed to be anything else. I just assumed the whole thing was a fling. Briar was no saint—she’d been with half the guys on campus before me—but at some point, I found out she’d actually been in love with me. When she realized she was pregnant, she came and told me at home, and my dad found out. To avoid a scandal, he forced her to get an abortion, and there was nothing I could do about it. Briar had problems: since childhood, her environment had been toxic, just like mine. Her parents had never cared about her or given her the things she needed. What happened between us caused her to have a nervous breakdown, and they checked her into the same clinic I’d been in once. I tried to get in contact with her; I tried a million times to ask her for forgiveness when I’d escaped from my own hell, but it was impossible. She had tried to kill herself when she was younger, and the doctors had refused to let me get close to her in case she tried it again.

“I’m sorry for all this, Briar… I never wanted to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you now—not you, not Noah. So, please, tell me where she is.”

She grinned vilely and looked me directly in the eyes. “She knows you’re cheating on her with Sophia, and she knows about us, too… She’s gone, Nicholas. She left more than an hour ago.”

An irrational fear invaded my body and left me petrified, my heart about to jump out of my chest. “Jesus! What have you done?”

53

Noah

I didn’t remember reserving a car. I didn’t remember how I got in it. All I could focus on was trying to breathe in and out. I was having a panic attack, one so horrible that my chest was aching, and it felt like someone was tearing out my heart.

I couldn’t stop thinking about all that had happened over the past hour. It was like I was trapped in a horror film. Finding out my mother had lied to me my entire life about virtually everything had shattered me inside, but when Briar told me Nicholas had cheated on me, had let me live with someone he had been sleeping with for months, someone he forced to have an abortion… I couldn’t take it anymore.

Was this really Nicholas we were talking about? How could he have done this to me? How could he have lied to me, laughed in my face, pretending they didn’t know each other? How had they both been able to keep up that farce? And why?

I had never felt anything so hard, so horrible, never before that day had I felt like everyone in my life was betraying me because itwaseveryone, every single person I loved, who had betrayed me thatnight: my mother, Nick, even Briar… I’d thought we were friends… I’d thought…

With trembling hands, I took out my phone. I needed Jenna with me, by my side, because I had no idea how to resolve this. I couldn’t imagine how I could recover from this blow.

“Are you all right?” the driver asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

All right? I was dying.

Jenna didn’t pick up. Then I saw Nick’s photo on the screen. I looked at it with unending pain, a pain far sharper than any I had ever felt before. Seeing his image, seeing that photo of the two of us together, smiling at the camera, my pain turned into an irrational hatred that lodged in my soul, a hatred for him and for any and everyone who had ever hurt me.

I had suffered enough. I didn’t deserve this. I just didn’t. All I had done, all I had been through to get to where I was, and then this… It was like my entire world was falling apart.

“This is your destination,” the driver announced just as a thunderclap crossed the sky, making me tremble.

I paid on the app and got out.

Since Jenna hadn’t responded, there was only one person left to turn to. I went to the entrance of the building and pressed button number eighteen.

I didn’t get the person I expected, but in those circumstances, either of them would have worked. Michael came down and opened up, and he seemed shocked when he saw me. I was an absolute wreck; I could barely even breathe. I didn’t care that I’d only known him for a few weeks: he had helped me, and more importantly, he knew me better than anyone—I had opened up to him in a way I’d done with almost no one else.

Seeing him through the mist of my tears, I stepped forwardand collapsed into his chest. He hugged me tight, and just then, I felt my heart fall out of my chest and shatter.

Three hours later, I opened my eyes in a completely unfamiliar room. My head was aching so badly, it was hard for me to focus on anything but the pain, and it wasn’t just my head, there was something else, something I didn’t understand… Then the truth hit me again, cold as ice.

I felt the tears stream down my cheeks once more, but in silence, as if I didn’t want to make things worse, as if I wanted to keep the drama at bay. But why bother? Everything that had happened was horrible, from beginning to end. Everyone had warned me, everyone I knew had told me this could come to pass, and there I was, in a bottomless pit because I hadn’t been capable of seeing it or accepting it in time.

I lay back on the cushions and looked around for something to distract me. I saw two lit candles on the nightstand. I considered getting up, but before I could, the door opened, and there, with a steaming mug in his hands, was Michael. It was strange to see him in pajama pants and a gray T-shirt, and it was even stranger to realize I was in his bed, in his sheets, after crying for hours while he held me.

“Hey!” he said, walking in and sitting beside me. “I made you a cup of hot tea with honey and lemon. After all that crying, your throat must be killing you.”

I nodded, grabbing the cup and bringing it to my lips. I was so crushed, so lost, that I didn’t know what to do or say. My legs shifted under the sheets, and I realized I was no longer in my dress. I was wearing a large white cotton T-shirt.

Michael seemed to be considering what to say, and just looking at him allowed me to see he was even tenser than I was. I lookeddown at the steam rising from the rim of my tea as I felt Michael’s fingers delicately wiping away my tears.

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