“Before she could end it, I sped the boat up, aiming for the middle of the lake, hitting each wave head on, reckless, because I didn’t dare touch her to try to shake some sense into her, I was afraid to stop, afraid that if I slowed down everything would change. Because I didn’t want to hear her telling me she didn’t want the hassle of being around me anymore.”

When I lowered my head, keeping my hands at the base of my skull, Aly touched me, just her palm against my back to let me know she was still there, still listening.

“I kept going faster and faster, a little drunk on her screams, more than a little dazed with the idea that she didn’t want me anymore. I just…I wasn’t myself.” I felt the burn in my eyes and tried to stop the tears with a tight squint. “I wasn’t myself that day, I haven’t been since.”

“Tell me,” Aly said, resting her chin on my shoulder and I let her, thinking that the warmth of her body, that sweet brush of her breath against my cheek would keep me calm.

“She was screaming at me. ‘Slow down, Ransom! Please!’ and I thought, at first, she was being dramatic. It made me laugh. I fucking laughed at her.”

“You kept going?” Aly asked, her voice even and I didn’t pick up any judgment, anything in her tone that told me she thought I was being cruel, even though I had been.

“I kept going, laughing like a madman, and then she screamed…” The expression was burned in my mind—a photograph of horror, shock that I’d never be able to erase. “I looked at her, asked her what the hell the problem was. I had no idea what she saw. And I’d…I’d never find out. I was going too fast, being too careless in that damned boat. The waves were so big and suddenly we hit something, hard. The cops thought it might have been a pylon. The water was so high that day, I probably wouldn’t have seen it. It…doesn’t really matter to me what I hit.” Rubbing my eyes wouldn’t take the sting away, it wouldn’t make the screams vanish. Nothing would. Not even Aly’s hand tightening on my arm. “We flipped. We…we both smacked our heads on the boat when it capsized. We both went under. I was a stronger swimmer, and was able to swim under the boat, but Emily….. I tried to find her…”

She heard something in my voice then, that crackle of pain maybe, the breaking apart of my composure, whatever it was had Aly pulling me close, had me forgetting about the tears burning my eyes. “I looked…I couldn’t find her. I looked everywhere.”

“Ransom…”

“I tried, God, Aly, I swam all around the boat, I swam under it.” Aly raked her fingernails through my hair, but it didn’t sooth me and I felt that swift pain in my chest, the same one I’d been trying to bury for over a year, sticking sharp. “I dove and I dove, over and over again. I called to her again and again, and then nothing would come out of my mouth. No sound. No breath. I was so damn dizzy, and even after all that time in the water I felt blood on the back of my head and I thought ‘okay, I’m dying now’ and I was so happy. Everything was going dark. I was fucking happy I was dying because of what I’d done. I just, I couldn’t find her and it was all my fault.”

“You passed out?” Aly prompted gently, again directing me away from the pain as I clung to her.

“I don’t remember. I remember the accident, I remember things much later, but a lot of stuff before that, even things that had happened days, months before, and especially the details of how we were found, no.” That had been one of the biggest frustrations, the not knowing. Not seeing her after that boat flipped. “It’s why I didn’t remember you or connect the dots that you were the girl whose father I ran off. My short term memory is still sort of messed up. But passing out? I just don’t know if that’s what happened or what. One minute I was hanging on boat begging God to kill me, praying that somehow Emily was on the shore or somewhere in the marsh, somewhere…and the next thing I remember is my father leaning over me as our neighbor rushed us back to the lake house in his boat.”

Dad had looked so scared. I knew why. He’d already lost Luka. That loss still ran deep, and the cost had been excruciating. And now his son?

Aly kissed my forehead, but I still had more to say. She needed to hear everything. When I moved back, looking down at her, Aly frowned, looking confused by the distance I put between us, but she let me have my space. “I left her out there, Aly. I…I left her alone.”

“That wasn’t your choice, cheri.”

I ignored her, wondering why she wasn’t listening, needing her to understand what kind of man I was. “She died out there alone.”

There was a pause, a silence, and all I could feel was my shame and my self-loathing. But then she spoke, and her voice spanned that ugly void that I carried inside of me.

“Haven’t you been doing the same thing?”

Only Aly could lay it out there for me, could stun me silent. She was right. She saw it, that I had been punishing myself—and I wasn’t done punishing myself. When Aly reached for my hand, I let her take it, still too much of a coward to keep from grasping the lifeline she offered.

“They wouldn’t let me see her…at the hospital…I knew they’d found her body because the cops came to my room and my dad cut them off at the door. My mom with was the doctor, and they wouldn’t let me…” I sat up, wiping my face dry. “I was released from the hospital the next day. But as we were leaving, Emily’s father came up to me. He was so angry. He attacked me. I thought he would kill me with his bare hands. I didn’t fight back. Part of me actually wanted him to kill me, but Kona…Dad, pulled him off and then kept him away from me. Kept telling the man, ‘this won’t bring her back. This won’t help.’” He protected me, had done what fathers are supposed to do for their children. So had Emily’s father, at least that day, because he hadn’t been able to protect her from me before then.

“Aly, when he stopped fighting… when he stopped trying to attack me, well….I’d never seen anyone look so lost in my life. It was as if everything had been taken from him. And it had. I had taken everything he loved away from him. The pain in his eyes….”

I sighed, helpless to do anything else but remember his haunted expression. But Aly, she needed to hear it all.

“Then he told me that I was weak, that I was nothing.” I curled my fists tight, closing my eyes so I could see the expression on his face again, remember it for what it was: my first punishment. “He said, ‘The only thing you’ll ever bring anyone in this life is heartache.’” Aly didn’t follow me when I left the bed. She let me pace; I stopped in front of the window but didn’t look beyond it. “It was a curse,” I said, leaning my palm against the glass. “And I accepted it as my fair due. In fact, I cradled it. I let it sink its teeth into me and allowed it to be my enduring punishment for what I had done. It fed me. It still feeds me.”

“It’s a crutch, Ransom.”

I glanced at her, shrugging. “Maybe.”

I didn’t tell Aly about the days, weeks afterward. I didn’t tell her about sneaking into the salvage yard to see the boat, how I found Emily’s small cross charm and chain under the wet carpet. I didn’t say anything about my parents asking that I talk to them, to anyone, so that I didn’t sink into the abyss of what I’d done. So that it wouldn’t keep me stuck out on that lake, selfish and reckless, hopeless and weak, just like I’d been the day Emily died.

I didn’t tell Aly anything else about how I gotten to where I was now, still lost, but wanting to find my way back, wanting more than anything to take back saying the wrong name when I was with her. I should have. But I didn’t.

Aly’s feet were silent as she moved away from the bed, but I caught the hint of her shampoo when she stood behind me. “You let this keep you, it always will.”

“You don’t get it, Aly.” I turned and faced her, curling my arms across my chest, not reaching for her like I wanted. “What I did, who I am now, I deserve it. You don’t see…”