Page 46 of Swan

It’s not your fault.

You can’t blame yourself.

Time will heal.

You’ll see no one blames you.

But then I remembered the conversation with Maya.

“If you’re going to blame yourself, then I should blame myself too,” she’d said.

“What? No!” I’d said as I’d wiped at my fresh tears.

“I pushed you to get answers. I pushed you to go see him. If it weren’t for me, we would’ve gone to the concert and things would be different.”

“It’s not your fault. I wouldn’t have gone if I didn’t want those answers.”

She shrugged. “Fine, the blame goes to both of us.”

“No, it’s mine,” I’d yelled.

“It’s not,” she’d snapped back.

Mum, Dad, and Texas had rushed into the room then.

But Maya had said, “We should have guessed his mum would get an obsessed girl to try and kill you. That things like that happen all the time. We should have realised that he would step in front of you to stop that bullet aimed at you. We should have worked it all out. We failed at predicting this fucking fucked-up situation, and someone ended up dead unfairly.”

A pain-filled moan escaped me. Sniffing, I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel.

Logically, I knew she was right. My choice to see him wasn’t what ended his life.

It was his mother and agent who were responsible. The jury had agreed, since the pair had been sentenced.

That woman had been at fault too. But she’d been sent to a secure psychiatric ward.

Still, even with other people seeing the fault in them, I couldn’t stop this guilt eating at me.

How did I get through this?

How did I not blame myself?

I wished there were a simple answer.

There wasn’t.

I would always hold a part of the blame close to my heart. Maybe I’d even learn how to carry on with it inside me.

Somehow.

A squeal escaped me when someone knocked on my window. I clutched my heart and peeked out. Maya’s smiling face greeted me.

I turned on the car enough to wind down the window. “Your brother called you.”

“Nope. I was in the shop when he walked in all broody. He told me he saw you and needed a friend.”

Drake was my friend too.

I didn’t like that he thought he wasn’t.

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