Before You Break

Chapter Fourteen Quinn

I held in a gasp. Fuck, that was a loaded question.

Here I was pouring my heart out to a perfect stranger and she asked me the one question I’d refused to ask myself. Never thought I was worthy enough to ask myself.

How come this stranger got closer to the true me than anyone had in a long time?

Except maybe for Ella. We were drawn to each other. It was natural. Hypnotic. Magic. And Ella had the same soothing tone as Gabby, like I could tell her anything. Except telling her everything would make her loathe me. And telling Gabby was what she was trained to do.

“I . . . I don’t know. All this time, that’s what I’d told myself.” I thought about what Amber had said in the parking lot that night. About still wanting me. I thought she’d been messing with my head.

“I guess I’ve always felt like I was only an obligation or a chore to people,” I said.

“Is that why you put so little stake in yourself?” Her voice was soft, soothing.

How in the hell had she guessed my deepest secrets?

“Maybe.” She’d pretty much hit the nail on the head. I immediately thought of my parents and maybe even Sebastian. I never stood up to him; I just fucking worshipped him. He had everything I didn’t. He was everything I wasn’t.

Maybe in the back of my mind I was glad he was dead.

“I just think . . . I just know . . .” I was having so much trouble getting the words to line up on my lips because they were so shocking, so mind-boggling. Could I even voice them out loud? “Maybe I would have done anything to get with her that night. What if I . . . Did I . . . kill him on purpose?”

I’m sorry, Sebastian. I didn’t mean that. My head was so messed up. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!

I heard Gabby take a deep and meaningful breath. “Do you honestly believe that, Daniel?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” I whispered. “No, that’s not true, I do know. And the answer is . . . no. At least not consciously.”

“Of course not, Daniel.” She said it so resolutely that even I might have believed her. “Besides, thinking it and doing it are two different things. Maybe you wanted him to disappear for a while, so you’d have a chance with this girl. But you didn’t want your friend dead.”

“Yeah, okay.”

And then I was lost in my own thoughts for long moments. And she let me be lost.

Until, finally, I repeated, “Yeah, okay.”

“So how did your night end?” she asked. “Your best friend was in the backseat and the girl you were crushing on was holding your hand in the front seat.”

“I got distracted. By her. And my own thoughts. I kept thinking he was going to wake up any minute and see that I was betraying him,” I said, sharing what I had never once uttered out loud. “I should have said no, let go of her hand. Told her to break up with him first.”

I thought of me and Ella. How close we’d gotten with our flirting. I told myself I wasn’t going to cross that line again, and I wouldn’t have. Even in the basement, when I was desperate just to touch her.

But then she broke up with her boyfriend, showed up in my room, and called my bluff. I was out of excuses. It was just me and Ella, free to act on our feelings. And I chumped out on her. Because still, somewhere deep inside, I didn’t believe that a girl could like me—really like me—for me. Just me. All of me.

“What happened next?” Gabby broke me from my self-pity.

“I don’t know exactly. To this day, the details are still shady. There was a truck in the next lane over, hauling ass. I must have veered over the line and we sideswiped each other. I lost control of the car—we were sent into a tailspin.”

I shut my eyes and relived that moment. The brunt of the impact. The sound of crunched steel, shattered glass. Losing control of the wheel. Amber screaming.

“My best friend flew out the side window. My air bag went off, and his girlfriend . . . she smashed her head against the dash, but her seat belt saved her.”

“So it was an accident,” she said very quietly.

I felt my anger building up but not to an all-consuming intensity this time. “I was being careless, not paying attention, and my best friend paid for it with his life.”

I placed my head in my hands and rocked back and forth. “He died and I’m still alive.”

“And that kind of devastation is the hardest to bear,” she said with such empathy in her voice. “I know.”

She said it like she really did know. Like she’d been through it, lived it, carried it inside her.

“What happened to the truck driver?”

“He survived,” I said.

I wouldn’t tell her that my parents had paid him off.

I had shared so much with her tonight, so why was that once piece of information so hard?

Because it was humiliating.

The truck driver had said he was sketchy on the details as well—who had swerved into whose lane. But then my parents became involved, spoke to the police, to Sebastian’s family, to the driver, whom they paid off, to make it all go away in a neat and tidy package. Like it never happened.

Except that one person was gone forever.

And another was broken and lost, possibly for eternity.

I should have yelled and screamed and told the police to put me in jail. Even Amber had blamed me. Asked me why I hadn’t seen the truck sooner as she cried over Sebastian’s body on the side of the road, a huge knot protruding her forehead.

It was the worst sight I’d ever witnessed in my entire life. One I’d never forget. Like it had been singed into the backs of my eyelids. I’d felt so horribly responsible that I’d retched right there in the grass near a blanket of shattered glass.

But a couple of nights later, my father came into my room, slapped me across the face, and told me to get ahold of myself. Said I would not ruin my life and his chances of running for office. Said the driver agreed to take the lesser plea and get the hell out of town. That Sebastian’s parents agreed it would all be for the best and wanted to put it behind them.

They never blamed me and they never would. The driver had taken responsibility.

Didn’t he realize that by paying people off, he was already blaming me? Me, his only child. It was the same as saying, You’re a fuckup. I don’t believe in you. I’m going to pay off someone to make sure it remains a secret—the real you remains a secret.

The following day, Aunt Gabby came over while I continued to barricade myself in my room. I listened to their muffled argument through the door. She told her sister that I deserved more. And then Mom kicked her out of the house.

Their relationship had been strained ever since. Not that it hadn’t been before that. Aunt Gabby and Mom were different as night and day and sometimes I’d lie awake in bed and wish I’d been born into Aunt Gabby’s family instead.

“What keeps you going, Daniel?” Gabby asked in a dreamy, faraway voice. “You haven’t ended your life, and I’m thankful for that. So what is it that makes living worth it?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” I thought about how I was trying to make it up to Sebastian’s parents. My drive to do that had replaced my desire for my parents to see me succeed.

“Sometimes . . . I mean, really, all this time, I’ve been trying to keep myself alive for his parents.”

“For your best friend’s parents?” she asked, with an incredulous tone in her voice.

“Yeah, I mean, so that I guess . . . so they’d have someone to check in with. So that I hadn’t abandoned them, too.”

“Wow, Daniel that’s really . . . selfless.”

“Selfless? I just . . . I’ve been filled with so much guilt, I figured it’s the least I could do,” I said. “But that doesn’t really answer your question. It certainly doesn’t make my life worth living. Not really. I don’t know what the fuck does anymore.”

“I hope when you figure it out you’ll call back and let me know,” she said, like she wanted me to make a promise. And maybe in her mind, it was a promise to keep me alive. Even still, for the first time in a long time, it was one I was willing to keep.

She gave me the names of a couple of therapists in the area. She asked me to at least set up an appointment with one of them. I wasn’t sure if I would, but I took the information anyway.

“Oh, and Daniel?” she said. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For letting someone in. I feel privileged that you chose me.”

It was as if the noose around my neck had been loosened. And I’d been allowed a few clean breaths. Maybe going home for spring break would be tolerable after all.

Yeah right. I might need to have Gabby on speed dial.

I flipped the light on in my parent’s garage and inhaled deeply. It was the smell I’d come to love most—besides a certain mysterious almond scent. It was like a mix of oil, metal, and paint—and, fuck, how I’d missed it.

I stepped farther inside and allowed my fingers to grasp the sheet that covered and protected one of my greatest accomplishments. I gently hauled the cloth over her bumper and my breath caught in the back of my throat. She was a beauty and I’d helped restore her.

And it had been too damn long since I’d laid eyes on her.

I squatted down, picked up the can of paint near the rear wheel, and blew the thick layer of dust off the top. I’d had such big plans for her. Had I continued my renovation the last couple of years I’d be taking her for joy rides by now.

But after the accident it just seemed wrong to refurbish the same kind of machine that was instrumental in my best friend’s death. And for me to find any kind of solace in it. All I could see was Bastian lying in the wreckage on the side of the road. The desire to rebuild anything, especially cars, had been zapped away. As if my livelihood, my spirit, had been vacuumed out of my soul.

But standing here now, I couldn’t keep the foreign feeling welling up in my chest at bay. As if it couldn’t be contained any longer or it would consume me. Permeate my skin, latch on to my bones, and flow through my veins.

I’d been too damn afraid all this time. Terrified it would taint Bastian’s memory. Make me a disgrace.

Instead, it was slowly killing me. I was withering away to nothing. A hollow shell.

As I rolled up my sleeves and reached for the screwdriver on the worktable, I allowed a singular emotion to take hold and it was so fucking potent that I felt tears burn the back of my throat.

I didn’t bother to swallow them down. I just knew I had to do this. Take this first step.

In order to survive.