“Yeah, well, she wasn’t going to go there if I hadn’t basically forced her to accept your invitation, so maybe it’s myfucking fault.”
“Yeah,well, I was the one who pulled a total jackass move when she was trying to leave, and we all know that’s how she got sick. If I hadn’t…” I gulp down the boulder attempting to lodge itself in my throat. “I just should’ve said and did all of that differently. Maybe she would’ve stayed if I’d said…or like...told her—”
“Nah, she knew,” Zoey cuts in. “Er...I guess, knows. I’m not trying to talk like she’s already freaking dead.”
I pick up my head. “She knows what?”
“That you’rein...love...with...her,” she says slowly, drawing out each word.
My gut does an uncomfortable turn. “She does?”
“Yeah.” A light, sardonic laugh splices the word. “She was totally freaking terrified to leave because she knew, and she didn’t want to hurt you.”
“She told you that?”
“Yeah. So don’t fuck yourself up thinking it would’ve changed her mind about staying. She wasn’t going to stay there no matter what you said to her.” Zoey pauses. “But you saying all that despicable shit that you did certainly didn’t help things.”
My shoulders sink as I slump against the wall. “Well...I guess I read literally everything wrong when it came to her.”
“No,” she counters in a slightly lighter tone. “I think she does love you...even now, after you were such a royal dick to her...but that wasn’t going to change her mind about staying. Her leaving when she did had nothing to do with how you feel or how she feels. She left because she’s scared of everything. Especially taking big risks like that. You know...with stuff that matters a lot to her. Like...with stuff she loves and really wants. Because she’s always been conditioned to believe that she’s not enough for the huge, amazing, fantastical things she wants in life.”
Zoey pauses for even longer. When she picks back up, her voice is pinched with tears. “You know, Vince, I wanted to slap the shit out of you for what you said to her that day, but her parents? Her stupid fucking ex-boyfriend? I have wanted to burythose assholes for years. They broke her down and made her scared of everything.” She sniffles loudly. “So, yeah, sorry to be blunt like this, Vince, but even if you guys were severely and horrifyingly in love, it wasn’t going to keep her from leaving. Uprooting her life and starting over in a totally foreign place would just be too much for her.”
Hearing all of that breaks my heart for a lot of reasons, and I’ve never felt so hopeless or impotent. Nothing can fix this situation other than everything they’re doing at the hospital, so there’s nothing I can do to fix and rebuild the parts of her that were broken down by people who were in her life long before I ever was.
In my mind, I can see Ava on the roof terrace, standing in front of roiling black storm clouds and telling me a story of how she cut the bullshit of those people out of her life.
“Your music helped me be brave during a time when I really needed to be brave. I’ll always love that.”
Part of me thinks that should make me feel better; knowing that something I did helped her feel empowered enough to put her foot down with those toxic people. But I don’t feel better at all. I feel like Ava’s being cheated out of all the amazing things she should’ve had a chance to do as a result of standing up for herself.
“Yeah, I can see that,” I mumble.
“Yeah,” Zoey echoes.
We slip into silence again, and after a few seconds, I hear the distinctive sound of Zoey full-on crying, but in a way that sounds like she’s got the phone covered. After another second, I hear her sniffle and clear her throat, but when she speaks, her voice is shaky and pinched.
“Anyway, I gotta go,” she says hastily. “I’m going to keep calling over there, and I’ll let you know when they have her off all the sleeping meds so you can keep trying her. I think it’s important for you to keep calling her. She’ll know you did that when she’s awake again, and that’ll make her feel like she matters. Because what I’m really scared of is her thinking, on some level, that her life doesn’t matter enough for her to fight the fight she needs to right now. She’s so exhausted and sick, and she just needs to know that she matters enough to put in the effort to fight through this.”
Zoey pauses again, and this time she sniffles loudly, and a full, unrestrained sob bursts over the line. “Tell her you love her, Vincent,” she squeaks in a teary voice. “Don’t be a chicken shit about it. She needs to know. Tell her like it’s the only thing that’s going to save her life, because hearing it might actually do that. She has to know her life is worth fighting for.”
“I do love her, Zoey.” I can barely force the words out of my constricted throat. “I love her a whole hell of a lot. And I will tell her. Just let me know when I can call again.”
“I will. Later, Vince.”
I end the call without saying anything else because I can’t speak. Setting the phone down on the floor next to me, I draw my bent knees closer to my chest and hunch over my lap. My head hangs low, and I press the heels of my palms into my eyes in a feeble attempt to dam the tears that won’t stop. I hold my breath in an effort to hold everything in, but that just reminds me that Ava’s heavily sedated right now because she can’t breathe.
And then it all just barrels out of me.
Twenty-nine years’ worth of stifled emotions pour from me, and I feel like a fucking child, sitting on the floor, crumpled up and sobbing, but who fucking cares anyway?
I am alone. And Gia was fucking right. I amgoing to end up a lonely old man because the only person I want with me is five hundred miles away getting eaten alive by a virus that didn’t even exist a year ago, so nobody really knows how to deal with it. And because of that, I’ll never be able to fix what I broke, and I’ll never have a chance to really be with her.
Everything is so fucking hopeless.
“Hey.”
It’s Meyer’s voice that cuts through the sounds of my thrashing sobs, and I react with my typicalmodus operandi.
