I managed to inhale sharply, and I coughed to clear my throat before pushing off from the door and walking over to my bed to sink down onto it. My phone pressed against my leg where I’d stuck it into my pocket.
Maggie’s face entered my thoughts, and without thinking about it, I pulled my phone out and scanned the contacts for her number.
She answered on the second ring.
“Hello,” she said softly.
It was late, but I knew the guys wouldn’t have left Brady’s yet.
“Were you asleep?” I asked.
“No. I’m still sitting right where you saw me last,” she replied.
I closed my eyes and pictured her up there in that window. Lost in her thoughts. In her solitude. She had spent so much time the past two years locked inside herself. Not talking to others. I didn’t like to think about it. The idea of her being alone hurt me. I understood it, but I wished I’d been able to be there for her the way she was for me. Maybe now I could be that friend she needed. Just like she was mine.
“Did you ever have times when you couldn’t breathe? When the pain was so intense, it squeezed your throat and held on tight?”
“Yes. It’s called a panic attack. I had them a lot. I haven’t since I moved here, though.”
So I wasn’t losing my mind. This was normal. “How did you deal with them?”
She sighed. “I didn’t at first. Once, I even passed out from not breathing. But I learned to think about something that made me happy. That gave me peace. I refused to let the pain control me. And the squeezing would ease up, and I could breathe again.”
She gave me peace. She was the only thing that had given me peace in a long time.
“Are you afraid to close your eyes at night?” I asked her.
“Yes. Because I know the nightmare will come. It always does.”
“Me too. I’m afraid he won’t wake up tomorrow,” I replied.
She was quiet for a moment. We both sat there and listened to the other breathe. Oddly, it was enough.
“One day that is what will happen, West. And it will be incredibly hard. But what you can do now is make the most out of the time you have left. Talk to him even if he can’t talk back. Hold his hand. Tell him everything you want him to know. So when he’s gone you don’t have regrets.”
Her mother had been taken from her without warning. And so had her father with his horrible, sick act. She’d lost it all just like that. She was right. I had time to make sure I didn’t have regrets.
“Do you have regrets?” I asked, already knowing the answer. I could hear it in her voice.
“Yes. So many,” was her soft reply.
I couldn’t imagine sweet Maggie having anything to regret. She was kind and gentle. It was hard to think of her being anything less than perfect.
“I’m sure you were the daughter every mother wanted,” I assured her. “I know yours had to have been very proud of you.”
She didn’t reply at first, and I was afraid I was making her talk about it too much. I had been focusing on her pain to forget mine. I hadn’t been careful enough.
“Two hours before my mother died, I told her she was ruining my life,” Maggie said, then let out a bitter laugh. “Because I wanted to go to a party that my friend was having at her house, and my mother didn’t feel like there was proper adult supervision there. I wanted to go so bad. I had thought her not letting me go was the end of the world. The worst thing that could happen to me. If I had only known two hours later that I’d lose her . . . that I would find out what the worst thing that could ever happen to me truly felt like.”
I closed my eyes and felt her regret heavy inside me as if it were my own. She had been a fifteen-year-old girl wanting to grow up. She had been acting out like all teenagers did. Hell, I had my fair share of screw-ups. It was just so fucking unfair that she’d lost her mother that way before she could fix it. Before she could apologize and make it right.
“She knew you didn’t mean it,” I told her, feeling like the words were inadequate. But I didn’t know what else to say.
“I hope so. But it will always be my biggest regret,” she replied.
I Was a Liar. Fantastic.
CHAPTER 15
MAGGIE
I woke up with my phone on my pillow. Then I had lain there and just stared at it for several minutes. I’d talked to West for more than three hours last night. Until I’d fallen asleep. Hearing my own voice when I knew he needed me to talk to him wasn’t hard. Yet the idea of speaking to someone else terrified me.
For so long I’d thought hearing my voice again would send me back into the corner, screaming uncontrollably. But it wasn’t doing that. I was talking to West with ease. Last night I had actually talked about things I’d thought I never wanted to talk about again. And I hadn’t had a panic attack or curled up into a ball and whimpered.
But was I ready to talk to other people?
No. I’d given them the only words I was going to give them.
I didn’t want them asking me things like West had. I didn’t want them making me speak in a courtroom where I would have to face my father. The man who had never missed seeing me cheer. Who’d clapped the loudest at my school play when I’d walked out as a bear instead of Goldilocks, which was who I’d really wanted to be. Who’d sung “Happy Birthday” to me dressed in a Superman costume with my Marvel comics cake in his hands the year I was obsessed with superheroes. That man was dead to me now. He had made every good memory a bad one. He had become something else. Someone else. Someone I couldn’t talk about or see.