While I Couldn't Breathe, He Was With Her novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Service Door

Calvin's POV

My sister walked the twenty steps of that corridor in the same shoes she wore to our mother's funeral.

They were silver now, and they were a size too big for her.

She stopped an arm's length away.

She was crying already, and the tears came quietly, the way they always had.

"You're real," Polly said.

"I'm real."

"I told them you'd..." She pressed her fist to her mouth. "I thought if I said it enough, it would stop being a lie."

"Which part?"

She looked at me and did not answer.

Behind her, at the corner, I saw Kirsten's green dress and the edge of her shoulder, and I knew she had not gone back to the ballroom.

I did not look at her again.

"You told a hospital I was dying," I said.

"I didn't say a hospital."

"Polly."

"He asked me what my brother did. I said you were a ranger. And he said, is he well, and I said..." Her face folded. "I said no."

"Why?"

"Because he looked at me like I mattered."

That was all she said, and it was enough to make my chest hurt.

I had raised her from the year I turned twenty-three, and one bad winter I worked two jobs to do it.

I had never once looked at her like that.

"Seven months," I said. "I texted you at Christmas. At Easter. I drove to Packwood in August and the diner said you'd quit."

"I couldn't answer."

"You could have said you were alive."

"I thought you'd tell him." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "I thought if you came, it would all go away. And he'd go back to her, and I'd have nothing."

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