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You’re not different.

She wasn’t running away. She was protecting herself.

Because she was doing new things. And she couldn’t bear to be hurt in the same old ways.

CHAPTER NINE

RORYHADRUNaway so quickly she had left her notebook and pen sitting under the tree.

He didn’t notice until after she’d run off, because he’d been watching her run from him.

She’d run like he was terrifying. After the whole incident with Riley yesterday, it was...

Shit.

So now he’d scared Rory. Great.

The one person he’d felt like he could talk to at all. Maybe that had been an illusion he’d been clinging to because nothing else felt...

Like her.

He picked up the notebook and the pen, and he stared at them. It was pretty. Gold-edged pages, a midnight blue cover with mushrooms and small animals on it. It was whimsical.

She had been a pretty whimsical kid. The way she’d talked about her favorite books like every fictional person in it was her best friend.

And now... She was pretty. She was able to put on a bright, cheery facade when delivering gift baskets. And then today, there had been such a deep sadness to her.

He knew about the middle school thing because he’d done what he could do to offset the bullying that had been about her crush on him.

What he hadn’t realized was how much it all still affected her.

He’d been golden back then. Everything had been. But for her... Her building blocks had felt wrong, and he had no idea what that was like. He knew what it felt like to be wrong now.

But his whole life had changed with a catastrophic blast. Hers had been a series of setbacks that had taken any fledgling confidence she might have had and cut it off down to the base of the stem. She had confidence. But it was new. Fragile. It kept having to try to come back in spite of all of it.

He was standing in rubble.

His whole life he’d been confident. His whole life things had been easy. He’d wanted something, and he’d gone out and gotten it, and people had been proud of him. His mom, his dad, his sister, the whole town.

Moving through the world had felt simple. Easy. Now it was like wading through a waist-high swamp.

He was constantly overwhelmed by what he couldn’t do.

He couldn’t make his scars go away. He couldn’t make himself give much of a shit about pleasing people, even while he watched the consequences of being such an unpleasant person destroy connections part of him wished he could build.

He couldn’t fix his brain. He couldn’t take back the way he’d been in those last months with Cassidy.

Yes, he had worked himself out of that space. He had changed some things. But those things would be changed forever.

He knew some things about himself now that he hadn’t before.

It was easy to think everything that had happened after the blast was caused by war. What he couldn’t escape was the fear that this was in him all along. If the only thing that had kept him from embracing all the worst parts of himself had been the accolades he’d gotten for being good. And the minute that was gone, so was his desire to begood.

He’d never taken drugs. His future had been too important to him. He’d never gotten drunk. He’d never done anything like that. He’d had no reason to want oblivion. His life had been perfect.

Then he’d been given a prescription for opioids. Pain pills.

And he’d found the addict inside him who had always been there, just waiting. Waiting to get that first hit.