Page 44 of Sail Away
“You never made me feel that way. I said that because I wanted to hurt you and because Preston put it in my head,” she said. “There’s something I never told you about Preston from when we were dating.” She plopped her thumb between her teeth and chewed on her nail.
“I don’t like the sound of that.” He wadded up another piece of paper. This time it landed right on her nose. He winked.
“He told me about Erin before you did. And he told me about how you blamed yourself for her death.”
“I did torture myself with that for a long time. But as I told you, Erin was bipolar and suffered from severe depression. She tried to cover it, and when she was younger, she did so pretty well. But near the end, she was just all over the place.”
“Preston would tell me when the two of you would go on some of your thrill-seeking adventures that you would go off by yourself and sometimes carry off some crazy stunt. He showed me videos of you doing some stupid things.”
Reid laughed. “I’m sure those images were from when I was young, like in my early twenties. Maybe from even before I met him and Erin.”
“Maybe. But he said you were the one with the death wish, not him. He made himself out to be the one who always had to keep you in check.”
“That’s funny because I’m a safety nut with a checklist.”
“But I believed him at first.”
“I don’t find that amusing at all,” he said, glancing at the screen. Sixty-eight percent left to go.
“Preston would tell me he often worried because you always said it should have been you and not Erin who died. But he told me that sometimes you’d get really drunk and say how you wished you could join her.”
“I think that’s pretty normal, and I probably said that in the first month or two after she passed, but I didn’t say it regularly.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Preston told me you’d never be able to get over Erin’s death. That if I looked close enough, you had constant reminders of her everywhere.”
“I didn’t realize you and Preston spent that much time together.” Fuck. He did have reminders of Erin all over his world. They had a product namedThe Erin. And out of respect for her family, whom he saw often, he had pictures of her in his house. He did nothing to erase her from his life.
“We didn’t. He would whisper these little jabs in my ear when we were together, or I’d get a text occasionally.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I wanted to believe that Preston was just heartbroken about his sister. I know how I would feel if I lost one of my siblings. Just thinking about it makes my eyes burn.” She lifted her shirt, unfortunately—or fortunately—showing off a black lacy bra and dabbed above her cheeks. “By the time we were at the end of our relationship, Preston had me believing I was just a fill-in for his sister.”
“Oh, Darcie.” He pushed his chair back and sprawled out on the bed. “Erin was the first woman I ever loved, but I never meant for her to be a comparison stick for you and me. I’m sorry that you were made to feel that way. I can’t believe Preston did that to you, especially when he knows why I kept all those keepsakes of Erin.”
“Why did you?”
“Because of how she died. I needed to remember the two sides of Erin. I believe it’s important, and I know she never wanted me to forget the complicated parts of her. She and I talked about her illness. About her depression. But she lied to me and to herself.” Reid wiped a tear that rolled down the side of his face. “In the end, I thought she had it under control, but I listened to Preston. To his family. I didn’t listen to my heart. To what my soul told me was true, and that was that Erin was in trouble.”
“Do you know that I’ve never seen Preston use any emotion when he speaks of his sister?”
“They really weren’t close.”
“Was that because he was ashamed of her mental illness?”
“Her entire family was. They still are. I’d never experienced anyone with that kind of depression before. I didn’t understand it or the emotional roller coaster she put me on, and I had no one to talk to. Preston wouldn’t listen. Her parents just thought she was moody. When she died, I felt like I had failed her because I did what everyone else had done in her life and pretended she wasn’t suicidal.”
“But she told you.”
Reid sighed. “All the time, but I thought because she either failed at doing it before I met her, or because she hadn’t tried when we were dating, that it was just her illness. But deep down I knew how badly she wanted the pain to end. And to this day, her family still won’t acknowledge what she did or how she felt. And Preston destroyed the proof.”
“What proof?” She set the tablet on the nightstand and rolled to her side. “There’s proof that Erin killed herself? You never told me she left a note.”
“She kept a journal, and she wrote her thoughts in it. Preston got rid of it.”
“How do you know? What did he do with it?”
“It was on her computer. I read about a month’s worth of her ramblings. It nearly killed me that I’d had no idea what kind of suffering she was going through every day and how hard she tried to be happy, for me. She wanted so much to benormalfor me. She thought killing herself would give me a chance at having the kind of life I deserved.” He ran his thumb over Darcie’s cheek, his skin dampened from her tears.
