29. Marcus

29

Marcus

My words hang in the kitchen like a toxic fog. The silence that follows is deafening, broken only by the sound of our still-ragged breathing.

I raise my gaze to Seb and instantly wish I hadn’t.

Because I can’t stand the hurt on Seb’s face. I can’t stand the fact I put it there.

“Why don’t you want me to love you?”

He’s standing there naked, his voice shaking slightly, but his eyes are steady and boring into mine.

I need to be honest with him. I owe him this much, at least.

“Because the last time people loved me, I failed them completely,” I reply.

Seb bites his lip. He bends to pick up his clothes from where they’ve been discarded on the floor.

He cleans himself with a paper towel without any trace of self-consciousness, then pulls on his boxers.

Normally, it’s my job to look after him after we have sex together.

But I don’t move. I completely understand why he needs to do this himself, have some distance from me right now.

Once he’s got his boxers on, he joins me at the table, wincing slightly as he sits.

“You failed them completely? How? I don’t understand.”

Seb is looking at me like I’m a complex problem to solve.

And even among the agony I feel right now, I can’t help a pulse of affection. It’s so typical Seb. Thinking that all he needs to do is collect the facts, so he can come up with a solution.

This man, who is everything bright and good in the world, deserves to know the truth about the person he thinks he loves.

Memories claw inside my brain, screaming to be let out. They’re like wild animals thrashing against the cage I’ve kept them locked in for so long. The bars are bending, warping under the pressure.

I pick up my shorts and pull them on. My hand instinctively seeks the pill bottle nestled in the pocket. With a shaky hand, I retrieve a pill and swallow it. The aftertaste is bitter on my tongue.

“My mother died of an overdose when I was sixteen,” I say, my voice low.

“That’s not your fault,” Seb says immediately.

“Yes, it was my fault. It was completely my fault.” My words are injected with frustration. Because I don’t need him absolving me of my crimes. I know exactly what they are, the depth and darkness of my sins, the stains that nothing can ever wash away

Seb tilts his head, his expression a mix of bewilderment and concern. “How could it be your fault?”

“Because I killed my sister.”

Seb rocks back in his chair, his expression stunned.

And I break. The sob seems to come from a place inside me hollowed out by guilt. It echoes in the empty spaces. My whole body shakes with the force of it, years of carefully constructed walls crumbling like sandcastles in the tide.

Seb kneels beside me, his arms wrapping around me. I should push him away, protect him from the mess that is me, but I can’t. I’m too weak, too selfish.

And I see exactly how much he loves me. I see it in the fierce protectiveness of his embrace, in the way he’s trying to absorb my pain into himself.

“You don’t need to talk about this, Marcus,” he says.

“I want you to know.” The words come out in a ragged gasp. “I want you to understand.”

I struggle to control my breathing. It feels like I’m drowning on dry land. The room starts to spin, and I grip the edge of the table to steady myself.

“You had a sister?” Seb’s voice is hesitant. And I know he’ll do this for me, give me the structure to get through this conversation, guide me through my minefield of memories. He’ll create a path for me, one careful question at a time.

Knowing this, knowing I can trust him, settles my breathing to the point I can get words out.

“Yes, I had a sister.” The words come out in a half-gulp, half-whisper. “Her name was Emmy.”

And the memories flood in.

Emmy was so particular about her name. If anyone dared call her Emeline, she’d cross her arms and declare, “Emmy! E-M-M-Y!” like she was spelling it out for a particularly slow student.

“Was she younger or older than you?” Seb asks.

“Younger. By three years.”

My earliest memory was being taken to the maternity ward the day Emmy was born. I stood on tiptoe, peering into a plastic crib, to see this tiny wrinkled thing with a shock of dark hair. She looked like an angry little old man, but when I touched her hand, her fingers instantly wrapped around mine.

“She was my little sister. She followed me everywhere. She hero-worshipped me.”

Memories of Emmy that I’ve tried so hard to suppress now overwhelm me. Every morning before school, she’d wait outside my bedroom door with a new “discovery” to show me—a leaf that looked like a dragon’s wing, a rock she’d drawn on, and once even a slug she named Herbert.

She had this way of humming off-key when she was happy, usually some mangled version of whatever song was stuck in her head.

When she learned to ride a bike, she refused to wear the princess helmet Mum bought her, insisting on wearing my old blue one instead, even though it was too big and kept slipping down over her eyes.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the onslaught of memories and force myself to continue. “And she died because of me.”

When I open my eyes, I find Seb watching me with his impossibly blue ones. His expression shows so much compassion that I have to look away, my fingers digging into my thighs hard enough to bruise.

“What happened?” he asks gently.

“She drowned. When she was six. It was my fault.”

Seb draws in a sharp breath.

I continue, the words lancing out of me. “My grandparents had a holiday home at Lake Taupō that we used to go to over the summer. There was this rocky outcrop at the lake, a few meters above the water. We called it Pirate’s Point.” I trail off and take a deep, shuddering breath before I continue.

“That day, Emmy spent hours drawing this treasure map, and she wanted me to play pirates with her. She was obsessed with the show Jake and the Neverland Pirates , but I had decided it was too babyish, and I didn’t want to play.

“We were up on the rock, and she was trying to show me her map, and I just wanted her to leave me alone, so I pushed her.

“I didn’t realize she was so close to the edge, and then suddenly, she slipped backward…”

Seb’s eyes are filled with tears. “If she was six, then you were only nine, Marcus. You can’t blame yourself for something you did when you were nine. You were just a kid.”

I smear my own tears across my face and force myself to continue.

“No, but the worst part was, after she fell, I panicked. I just…froze. By the time I jumped in, she’d gone under, and it took me ages to find her.”

There are no words to describe the panic I felt while searching the water. I kept diving, my eyes stinging, my lungs burning, but all I could see were shadows and shapes that weren’t my sister. It felt like the lake itself was working against me, hiding her from me as punishment for what I’d done.

When my hand finally brushed against her arm, the relief lasted only a heartbeat before the horror set in—she wasn’t moving, wasn’t fighting against my grip as I pulled her to the surface.

“And when I got her to shore, she was gone.”

I feel detached as I say the words.

As detached as I felt when I pulled Emmy’s body from the water, when I watched the paramedics try to revive her, when I heard my mother’s anguished screams, when I saw my father collapse to his knees beside her lifeless form.

Like some fundamental part of me had broken off, leaving a vast, echoing emptiness. Everything became muffled, like I was watching from a distance, and I noticed absurd details. Her charm bracelet, which she’d been so proud of, flashed in the sun as the paramedics worked on her. Mum’s sun hat rolled away in the wind, no one moving to catch it. Someone wrapped a towel over her shoulders—her favorite one with the unicorns she’d begged Mum to pack.

“Oh, Marcus,” Seb says.

But my story hasn’t finished. What happened to Emmy isn’t my only sin.

“I didn’t tell my parents the truth, that I pushed her. I let them believe it was an accident, that she slipped.”

I run a shaky hand through my hair, unable to meet Seb’s gaze. “My mum… She’d always had some mental health problems. But after Emmy died, she sank into this deep depression. When I was fifteen, she was in a psychiatric institution for over a year, getting help. But then she seemed to get better. She came home, and she was more like her old self.

“I wasn’t doing so well though… The secret I was carrying, it felt like it was a cancer, eating me alive from the inside out.”

I sit rigidly, my entire body vibrating with tension. My fists clench at my sides, nails digging into my palms. But I force myself to continue.

“And I thought… I thought if I told her what really happened, it would help. I guess I was looking for absolution, you know? I wanted her to tell me she still loved me despite what I’d done. So I told her.”

“What happened?” Seb asks the question like he doesn’t want to know the answer.

“She went silent initially. Then she laughed, this horrible, broken laugh, and said, ‘I know you’re lying. You have to be lying.’”

I remember her hands shaking so violently she dropped her coffee mug. It shattered on the kitchen floor, dark liquid spreading like a stain across the tiles. She didn’t even seem to notice, her eyes fixed on some point beyond me, beyond everything.

“She overdosed two days later. I found her when I came home from school. She didn’t leave a note, so they don’t know if it was deliberate or accidental.”

“Oh my god, Marcus,” Seb says.

“My father hates me as a result. Like, absolutely loathes me. My mother obviously told him I pushed Emmy, and after Mum overdosed, he could barely look at me. That’s why he shipped me off to boarding school. He didn’t even care when I changed my last name to my mother’s maiden name… I thought if I could become a big Hollywood star, do something with my life, prove I was worth something, it might change things. But he doesn’t even respond to my messages anymore.”

I press my palms flat against my thighs, trying to stop the trembling that seems to start in my bones and ripple outward through my skin.

“Marcus, you need therapy. You need to talk to someone about this…” Seb says, but I cut him off by shaking my head.

“No. I can’t… I can’t talk about it with a stranger. I don’t want to relive it. I’m only telling you because…because I want you to know who I am deep down. And why, no matter how I feel about you, I can’t ever be what you need.

“I can give you sex, and I can exchange messages with you, but I can’t give you a happy ever after, Seb. I’m not capable of it.”

Seb just stares at me, his eyes wide.

“It’s like I’ve got this hole inside me that nothing can fill. No matter how happy you make me, how many good reviews I get, or how much money I make, it doesn’t make a difference… You said you love me, and I didn’t say it back because I don’t think I’m capable of love anymore…” I take a shuddering breath. “But I do know that whatever withered remains of my heart are left belong to you.”