Page 142 of Past the Broken Bridges

A swarm of memories comes back to me, hitting me as hard as the news did, and I wonder if Sawyer will ever be honest with me.

Maybe that’s why I don’t ask the questions I should know the answers to. Because I don’t want to know. They say ignorance is bliss.

So I embrace it and add it to the list of my own secrets that fester under my skin for another day.

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispers.

I can only stare at her.

“What I said that day in the truck.”

My stomach dips.

I should have chosen Dawson.

Her voice is broken when she says, “He’s gone.”

It should have been me.

“I know.” My voice cracks. “Let’s not talk about it right now. We have…time.”

I stare at her, wondering how true that is.

Time.

She’s said time is relative.

I guess now I know why.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Sawyer

A warm body encompasses my frame, making it impossible to move from under the blanket wrapped snugly around me.

The last twenty-four hours have been a bigger blur than the days I spent at the hospital. I barely acknowledged the nursing staff who wished me the best as I was wheeled out of the building. I tried fighting them, but I still found myself sitting in the pathetic chair, being wheeled to where Banks was waiting at the curb beside an unfamiliar car. I didn’t know until later that it was his father’s, but I didn’t let myself ask why he’d let him take it or if they’d talked about what I’d said to the older professor when I’d stormed into his office.

“I won’t fall apart if you let go of me,” I murmur tiredly now, blinking past the grogginess that weighs down my eyelids.

Banks has been stuck to me like glue since we got back, worrying the same way my mother used to when we first found out I was sick. I’m not sure which I wouldprefer—someone who caters to my every need or somebody who runs from them.

I know from experience that there’s never an in between.

Banks’s arm tightens once before I feel a pair of lips against my shoulder. He pulls back, sitting up and letting me turn onto my back to look up at the ceiling of my bedroom.

“Is there treatment?” he asks, voice far too awake for the time of day. I’d bet money on him having been up for hours—I could feel his eyes on me as I slept, like he was afraid I’d stop breathing in the night.

That’s what my mother did until Aunt Taylor had to tell her to give me space.

“Yes,” I say.

A long pause silences the room.

“Good. That’s…” He’s struggling.

“Banks…I endured those treatments for five years,” I tell him, turning my head to meet a pair of wide, muddy eyes. “I can’t do them anymore.”

He pales. “What do you mean you can’t do them? Have they stopped working? There’s medicine for everything these days; there has to be a—”

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