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My breath hitched.
She sighed, propping herself on one elbow. “I wasn’t trying to ambush you. I swear to God, Vivi. I didn’t want it to go down like that.”
“You mean with a therapist and six pairs of eyes looking at me like I was a grenade?”
Her mouth tugged downward. “Yeah. I mean that.”
I looked back at the sky. Clouds smudged across it like bruises.
“I was worried,” she said. “You were doing shit that scared me. The bridge stunt, namely. It wasn’t about control. It was about not wanting to find out through some news report that you’d finally gone too far.”
I didn’t answer right away. I traced the edge of a pebble with my fingertip, feeling its warmth from the sun.
“I’m not on drugs,” I said finally.
“I know.”
“It’s not pills or booze or anything like that. I just …” I swallowed. “I just needed the silence. The high. The second before you land, when nothing else matters.”
She nodded. “I get that.”
“I wish you hadn’t done it, though,” I admitted. “The intervention. It made me feel like a suspect in my own life.”
“I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. But I’d do it again if it meant keeping you breathing.”
That sat between us for a beat, a line of truth neither of us stepped around.
“I’m still mad,” I said.
“That’s fair.”
We sat in it. Let it hurt. Let it heal.
The breeze stirred around us, hot and restless.
Jessa picked at a scab on her knee, the quiet stretching long enough that I thought maybe that was it. Maybe we’d leave it there—two women on a rooftop, tethered together by adrenaline and old loyalty, saying just enough to keep the silence from crushing us.
But then she looked up.
“You know, if you’d just talk to us … like really talk to us … maybe we wouldn’t have had to guess.”
I frowned. “About what?”
“Everything,” she said, throwing her hands up. “The stunts that got more and more dangerous. The way you looked like you hadn’t slept in weeks. I mean, you think we were trying to control you? We were trying to figure out what the hell was going on because you wouldn’t let us in.”
My jaw clenched. “That’s the thing. Letting people in doesn’t make things better. It just gives them a front-row seat to the train wreck.”
“Or maybe it gives them a reason to stand in front of it and pull the brakes.”
I let out a dry, hollow laugh. “Cute metaphor. But no. No good ever came from dragging people into family shit they can’t fix.”
Jessa studied me for a moment. “So it is family stuff.”
I didn’t answer.
She kept going anyway. “I figured. I mean, I wondered last night what Emmaline was talking about—what she almost said.”
My head snapped toward her. “She didn’t?”