The Truth of Letting Go by Amy Sparling

Author:Amy Sparling [Sparling, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen minutes later, I can’t take my eyes off the coffee shop. I study each person coming and going, making sure one of them isn’t my cousin in some disguise trying to get out of here. The rain is heavier now, seemingly pouring in waves from the sky instead of mere rain drops.

Ezra’s knees face mine as we sit in the front seats of the Winnebago. I’m leaning on my elbow, watching the coffee shop through his driver’s side window. The rain is hitting us from the passenger side, so this is the only clear view. It’s also a view of Ezra’s ridiculously handsome profile, but I’m trying not to notice that.

His shoe slides across the floorboard and taps the toe of my Converse. “What happened between you two?”

“What do you mean?” I say, talking louder than usual because the storm raises the sound level by a thousand decibels in here.

“You and Cece used to be best friends,” he says, looking up at me from under a stray clump of his hair. “Then I don’t see you for a few years and it’s like you’re strangers. Or worse—you act like her mother now.”

I shrug, still watching the coffee shop. “Cece went completely crazy after Thomas died. It was like she was drunk when she hadn’t been drinking at all. She would run away and get brought home by the police because she’d done something stupid like take off her pants and dive into the mall fountain, thinking it was funny.”

“Wow,” he says.

“Yeah, then it got worse.”

“What do you mean?”

I press my lips together. The past is kind of personal, but I do trust Ezra. He’d have no reason to betray us and seeing as how he’s been projecting this sort of big brother love on Cece since we started this thing, I decide to tell him everything.

“She’d slip into a depression and wouldn’t leave her room for days. She attempted suicide—” I swallow, the memory of finding Cece that day is too much to bear. Especially right now. “She went to a mental illness facility for a few weeks and when we came home, nothing was the same.”

Ezra looks down at his lap while he processes. “We should have stayed in touch. I could have used your friendship after my mom died. Sometimes I thought about reaching out, but we weren’t exactly best friends back then.”

I can’t help but smile, even if the very act hurts my insides. “We would have been there if we’d known. I’m sorry we didn’t. Cece could have used you, too. Mom just sent us to therapy over and over until someone suggested that Cece might have real depression, not just the depression you get over losing your whole family, but the medically diagnosed kind.”

I draw a circle in the dust on the dash. It’s been so long since I’ve let myself remember those days, the dark ages in our family’s history. I’ve shoved aside the ache that came with the unbelievable loss, and focused on the aftermath of therapy and how much I hated it.

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