“I’m not sick anymore,” Mike informs her mid-sentence, and Danica frowns.
“Did Hailey give you my card with the other basket?” she asks, and Mike lifts an eyebrow.
“You mean the one that she signed your name in? I know your handwriting, Danica. You had nothing to do with that card.”
“But the whole basket was my idea! I—”
“What?” Mike interrupts. “You what? You want a medal for sending someone else to the store to throw shit in a basket?”
“Why are you being so mean?” Danica pouts, and Mike sighs and rubs a line between his eyes.
“I just don’t want to do this anymore.” He swings his finger between himself and my cousin. “There’s nothing here. I’m sorry . . . I had a crush on you when we were kids, but that’s all it ever was.”
Something tells me I should give them privacy, that I should back away slowly and disappear. But I’m too busy watching Danica’s knuckles whiten as she strangles the handle of her care basket, and then her viper eyes are pinning me in place.
“Is this because of her?” she snarls while glaring at me.
“No.”
“Bullshit,” Danica spits. She glowers up at him. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Why are you doing this?” he asks.
“Doing what?!”
“Fighting so hard.” Mike’s voice is tired but steady. “There’s nothing here to fight for.”
“Why do you keep saying that!” she shrieks. “You’re only saying that because of her!”
“This isn’t about her,” Mike insists.
“This is ALL about her. Tell me you don’t like her!”
“Danica—”
“Tell me you don’t fucking want her, Mike! I’m not blind! You think I don’t see it?!”
“This is about me and you—”
“Say it!” Danica’s face turns red, her voice making my ears ring. “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t have feelings for my fucking cousin!”
Mike quiets, hesitating, and then his eyes find mine across the room. Danica is staring at him, and he is staring at me, and I’m holding my breath when he says, “I’m in love with her.”
Chapter 25
I’m in love with her.
Someone gasps. Me? Danica? All I can do is stand there convincing myself that I couldn’t have just heard what I think I just heard. Mike is standing by the door, his hair still a mess from a night spent on my pillow, and his brown eyes make the world fall away. He says it again.
“I’m in love with her.”
My lips part, and a violent scream tears through the room. My eyes dart to Danica just as she chucks her gift basket against a wall, sending soup cans rolling in every direction. She continues screaming as she balls her fists, stomps her foot, and storms out of the house.
Mike looks at me, I look at him, and I don’t know what to say, so I say the only thing I can. “You should follow her.”
He scratches his hand through his hair, and my eyes beg him to go. I need a minute. I desperately need a minute. And when he gives it to me, closing the door behind him, I stand there trembling from my fingers to my toes.
There was no mistaking those words. He said them twice, just to make sure I understood them.
Mike is in love with me.
He’s in love with me?
He’s in love with me.
I sit down on the floor because my knees are too weak to hold me up, and I bury my fingers in my hair, trying to think. When? How long? Why? How?
Danica is going to bury me after this—absolutely bury me.
Mike loves me. He loves me.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I just sit there staring at a spot on the floor. Sharing my pillow: it meant something to him. Asking me to go to bed last night: it meant something to him. A dozen “sweet dreams”: they all meant something to him.
Our late-night phone calls. Our walk in the woods. The way he kept pushing his hat onto my head.
He loves me. All of it meant something, and not just to me.
When the front door opens again, Mike isn’t alone. Danica walks right over to me, and from my spot on the floor, I crane my neck to stare up at her. Her makeup is smeared from tears that I’m guessing—hoping—didn’t work on Mike, and when her hand drops in front of my face, I realize she’s offering to help me up.
It’s the scariest thing she’s ever done.
“Come on,” she orders when I hesitate, and I obey simply because I’m positive the alternative would involve me getting kicked in the face. I let her pull me up, and then I stand there waiting for her to push me back down.
“I’m not mad at you, Hailey,” she says, and she might as well be speaking a foreign language, because none of this is making sense in my head. “I feel terrible about kicking you out.”
Wait, what?
“I just want to go home, okay? This is all my fault.”
All her fault . . . ?
Danica hasn’t accepted responsibility for her actions since she was old enough to realize that her pretty smile is the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Broken toys, bad grades, missed curfews: they’ve all always been someone else’s fault. And it clicks for me then: what’s happening. I can almost see her too-big smile hiding behind the act she’s putting on, and I resist my fight-or-flight instinct. My feet stay planted in place. I’m a dormouse about to be eaten alive.