This must be growth, right? Putting the community’s interests over her own. Letting him love thousands of people instead of just her.
This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? This was their only option.
If she could just keep saying that. Keep believing it. She could walk out of here on the strength of her own two legs. The edges of her vision darkened a little.
Shouldn’t there be some freedom in this ending? Shouldn’t she get to relish regaining her independence? Cutting all the new ties that had bound her to organized religion and ordinary people?
There wasn’t.
She didn’t.
“You will always be the best thing that ever happened to me,” she told him, hands chasing every part of his face, his arms, his chest, trying to commit them to memory, trying to force herself to say good-bye.
She felt like she’d been poisoned and had to spit the antidote back in the grass.
“No,” Ethan said again, but there wasn’t as much behind it this time. His whole body shook. “Don’t do this. Please.”
Naomi might love him until the day she died.
Wouldn’t that be an exquisite tragedy? She had to douse a hysterical laugh.
She held Ethan tighter and wished she could pour herself into him, abandon the pain flowing through her own body.
Even though she was still standing there. Still holding him. She was already gone.
I am a stick of dynamite.
It was no great tragedy when dynamite destroyed itself, not when that was exactly what it was designed to do.
Chapter Thirty-Three
ETHAN OPENED HISdoor the next morning to find Leah holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a carton of chocolate milk in the other. She pushed them toward him, one after the other.
“Which one do you want?”
He took the chocolate milk and walked back inside. It took a lot of restraint not to open it and chug. Also to avoid pressing the cold, sweating carton against the side of his face, puffy as it was from lack of sleep. Everything ached. That premonition kind of sick when you could feel illness on the horizon, waiting to descend. Sore throat. Limbs that weighed twice what they ought to. A weariness that went deeper than his bones. It was like his immune system had heard about last night and given up the ghost.
“Are you gonna tell me what happened?” Leah helped herself to one of his glasses and poured in a few splashes of whiskey. “You don’t look like you got in another fistfight.”
Oh. Right. He’d texted her one word, hours after Naomi had left, somewhere around sunrise.Ow.
He’d felt like he should tell someone. You were supposed to call for help while drowning.
Ethan opened the cabinet. Sighed. Of course he was out of clean glasses. Lifting down a mug instead felt like a Herculean effort.
“I’ve recently become unemployed.” The chocolate milk sloshed out of the carton, making a satisfyingglug-glugnoise as he filled the mug to the rim. It didn’t hurt as much—the second time he said the words out loud—but the difference was negligible. For the first time in his life, he felt like he understood why dogs howled at the moon.
“What?” Leah lowered her whiskey, slamming the glass down hard enough that amber liquid splashed up and onto his counter.
“And single,” he said, because why not get it all out at once? The chocolate milk was good, smooth and rich on his tongue, conjuring comforting memories chock-full of nostalgia. It was fine that he was thirty-two, without prospects for either employment or matrimony, and drinking chocolate milk. F-I-N-E.
Leah walked around the kitchen island to smack him on the arm. “Are you serious?”
“Afraid so.” He swiped at the chocolate milk running down his chin. He’d been midsip when she’d hit him.
“What in the... why would...” She huffed indignantly several times. “What the fuck did you do?”
That was the problem. Or one of them, at least. He hadn’t done anything. He’d let the board push him out of the synagogue. Let Naomi push him away. He’d run, again, because it was easier than staying and cleaning up the mess of his loss.