Page 114 of Bring You Back

I close the drawer and move to the nightstand. My hand pauses around the knob, the last searchable drawer, and I ease it out as I send out a silent hope that this isn’t all for nothing. As much as I don’t want to find the pieces she’s keeping locked away, I’m going to need more than my mother’s camera to open Camille up.

I’m braced, my body tensing as two medium-sized pill bottles slide into my view.

My curiosity doesn’t let me hesitate as I reach in with both hands, turn the bottles over in each. My left holds pain pills, my right holds sleeping pills. That’s more than enough to let me know how she’s doing.

I stare at the bottles, turn them over, and over, and over, until I realize I’m losing time, and shove them back inside the drawer. My finger catches on something hard, spirally, and I pull out a small notebook. The red front holds me captive, warns me like a stop sign. This isn’t a place I should go.

I’ve been inside Camille’s head. We all have. But this is something that’s not meant to be seen. If this were normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t even be doing this, I remind myself. I’ve come this far. There’s no time for second thoughts, so I shut off the protests in my brain, and I flip it open with a quick hope that the pages are blank or that her reading habits have finally made her want to start writing a book of her own.

The first sentence, written out in her swirly cursive, tells me what I already suspected—this isn’t fiction. These are memories. Of Caleb. Starting from the last time she saw him. My eyes keep reading despite the voice in my head I’ve been trying to quiet screaming at me to stop until I’ve taken in every black word on the page. They started small, even, on the lines, then turned bigger, messier, scrawled with a quick, trembling hand as she relived the last moments with her brother alive.

She’d sent him out that night.

Fuck.A sliver of ice lodges itself in my chest, a cold that burns as I pull in a breath.

I shouldn’t read these. Yeah, I needed something to work with, but how the hell am I supposed to work withthis? I wasn’t expecting this. This is new territory for her. For me. For us.

I shake my head at that thought.Well, no shit, dumbass.

Still, I decide to leave the memories the two of them shared of their time in Ohio alone. Those aren’t mine. I flip through until something pops out from their time here, with us.

And what I find shouldn’t surprise me. But it does. Caleb told her to stay. He encouraged her to follow her heart before they left, having her best interest in mind. There aren’t exact quotes, but something in Camille’s summarization and thoughts tells me Caleb knew her heart was here. She debated, but in the end, she chose him, and he didn’t protest because he also knew her heart was with him, too.

Anger and pain still find me at any reminder of Camille leaving, but the feelings don’t hold as tightly. They’re losing their grip, shifting focus from me, to her.Forher.

Camille has lost practically every piece of her heart, and those scars are evidence of her filling the gaps. I might not have physical marks to show for my loss, but I’ve been doing the same damn thing.

Her problemsaremy problems. Her loss is my loss. And I’ve never felt that more until now.

I flip through the pages some more, glance over the words, the little things she wrote about Caleb that she wants to remember. There’s a whole entry dedicated to the sound of his voice. Another describing his face, his hands, his smiles—he had practically five different ones, and I laugh to myself just thinking about them. I was mostly on the receiving end of the amused one, but last year, before he and Camille left town, his smile turned somewhat conspiratorial. Knowing. Especially when we were both around Camille. He sensed my feelings for his sister before I did.

I flip through other small, earlier memories; how he taught her to ride a bike, when she bought him his first pet.Cappers, I think with a smile. A red veiltail. The little guy had died during the first year of our friendship. Caleb and Camille wanted to flush the fish down the toilet—like in the movies—but Reyna insisted on a funeral. Tommy backed her up, as always. Cappers still ended up flushed, but we all said a few words for Reyna’s benefit. Most consisting of how he was such a good boy, how he loved to swim, and minded his own business.

I flip some more, stopping at an entry about basketball. Caleb was the first to play with Tommy after Tommy’s parents set up the net. Reyna wanted to pretend she and Camille were cheerleaders, and of course Camille didn’t play pretend well, rather choosing to read about it on the page. It took some heavy convincing on Reyna’s part—and an extra teasing push from me—until Camille finally caved. Tommy and I cracked up at her flat delivery next to Reyna’s epic enthusiasm, and Caleb wouldn’t stop talking about it for a week.

This isn’t get in and get out,my head scolds me. I start to shut the notebook until another voice nags at me to look at the last entry. I don’t know what I’m expecting to find other than her first known memory, but I stop breathing when my eyes land on three words.

Caleb, help me

The tail of theeis darker, dug in where she stalled, held and pressed.

My eyes close against a sharp pull of cold, burning breath.

“Good thing I just got fired, right?”

My eyes snap open at her voice—a simple question wrapped around a hard, accusing tone.Fuck.It isn’t that Camille wasn’t intended to find out; it’s that she isn’t supposed to find out this way. She isn’t supposed to catch me in the act. I’m not prepared for this conversation to happen right now. What the fuck am I supposed to say?

“Having fun, Reyna?”

I return the notebook to the drawer and face her pointed stare. She raises a brow in waiting.Ready or not.“This is different.”

She scoffs. “You say that like you haven’t changed.”

I move around the bed toward her, and she immediately puts up her shield, arms folded over her chest. “I just needed some time,” I argue, her gesture bringing me to a stop a little past the foot of the bed. I say it like it’s simple, but I won’t let her turn this around on me. I’m in here, doing this, because of her.Forher. “But you’re stuck.”

“I have a better way of handling my shit, you mean.”

Now I scoff. “You’re nothandlinganything.” I need the pills in my hands to wave in her face. “You can’t sleep, Camille.”

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