Page 50 of Grief & Glitter

Noah looked old. That was my first thought when I saw him, not hurt, not sick, old. He was thirty, five years older than me, far too young to look the way he did lying against white hospital pillows with his eyes closed and his face gray under the fluorescent lights.

Dad sat beside the bed. He’d changed since I’d last seen him too, or maybe I’d never really looked. His shoulders were rounded, his shirt creased, and there was dried blood on one cuff that I refused to think about.

He stood when I walked in, and for a second neither of us moved. Then Dad hugged me. My father hugged me, and I went rigid from pure shock before my arms came up around him. He held on. So did I.

“He’s going to be okay,” Dad whispered.

I looked over his shoulder at Noah. Physically, that was what everyone kept saying. Physically, he’d be okay. Nobody seemed willing to tell me what happened after that.

Ryan waited outside. He hadn’t even asked if I wanted him to come in, just squeezed my hand and told me he’d be right there. Dad let me go, and I went to the bed.

Noah’s arm lay on top of the blanket. There were marks on his skin, some new, some not, and the older ones stopped me cold. Thin, pale lines, more than one, more than five. The same as the ones on my own arms. He’d been lost to grief the same as me.

“I didn’t know.” Dad looked destroyed. “He’s such a good cop, so good at his job. He had friends. He was—” He couldn’t finish it.

I didn’t say that I’d held down a career too, had friends too, and none of it had stopped me from falling apart either.

That was somehow worse. We’d both been so busy surviving Ethan that we hadn’t seen Noah disappearing right in front of us. Except I hadn’t even been looking. I’d spent ten years drowning in my own guilt, counting all the things I should’ve done differently, replaying that afternoon until every second had been worn smooth. I should’ve stopped Ethan. I should’ve known the ice was too thin. I should’ve made him go home. I should’ve saved him. Me, me, me. I’d made grief into something so personal I’d never once stopped to wonder what it was doing to everyone else.

“I should’ve seen it,” I said.

Dad sat down heavily. “So should I.”

Noah moved, barely anything, a shift beneath the blanket, a crease between his eyebrows, and then his eyes opened. He saw Dad first, then me, and his face crumpled. He turned his head away.

“Noah.”

“Go home.” His voice was rough.

“No.”

“I don’t want you here.”

“Tough.”

Dad looked at me. I pulled the chair closer and sat. Noah still wouldn’t look at me. “I got your message.”

His eyes closed. “You weren’t supposed to see it until afterward.”

The words hit harder than anything else had. I gripped the edge of the chair. “Fuck you.”

Dad flinched. Noah didn’t.

“You don’t get to do that,” I said.

“Gideon.”

“No, Dad. He doesn’t get to send me that and then fucking die.”

Noah finally looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. I’d never seen Noah cry, not at Mom’s funeral, not at Ethan’s, not once in ten years. “You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it.”

His mouth twisted. “You don’t want that.”

“I fucking do.”

“No.”