THE DAY FELL APART TWICE

The plan was simple.

get to zara's by noon, cook the meal we had been talking about since thursday, eat too much, watch something neither of us would finish, and call it a sunday well spent.

I had my bag on my shoulder and the car keys in my hand and I was approximately four minutes from being out the front door when aunt Carol looked up from the kitchen counter where she was sorting through mail and said, "you're going to zara's again?"

“Yes, I am," I said.

she made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite disagreement and went back to her mail. I should have just left. four more steps and I would have been at the door and the rest of the day would have gone exactly as planned.

but I waited. 

"you were out late last night," she said.

"I stayed at Zara's."

"and the night before?"

"Also Zara's."

she set down the mail and looked at me properly now with that expression she had been wearing more and more lately.

 "brielle."

"Yeah, aunt Carol?"

she folded her hands on the counter. "im really not comfortable with the way you've been living. Going out, coming back at late hours, the.. " she paused, choosing her words in that careful way that meant she had actually been thinking about this for a while, "the men."

there it was.

i shifted my bag on my shoulder. "we're not doing this today."

"When are we doing it then? Because I keep waiting for a good time and there doesn't seem to be one."

"Because there isn't one," I said. "because there's nothing to talk about."

"you are throwing your life away over some heartbreak…"

"it wasn't just any heartbreak." the words came out sharper than i intended and i let them because they were true. "Don't say it like it was nothing. He wasn't nothing. Damian wasn't nothing. I gave him everything, every single part of me that I had, and he treated it like it was disposable, like I was disposable." My jaw tightened. "So don't stand there and reduce it to just a heartbreak."

carol's expression shifted into something softer for just a moment. "i know it hurt you. i'm not saying it didn't…"

"Then stop acting like I should just be over it."

"it's been three years, Brielle."

"and?"

"and you're not living," she said quietly. "you're just… reacting to the pain that happened three years ago. You're letting a boy who isn't even thinking about you anymore dictate every choice you make."

I laughed and it wasn't a kind sound. "I'm not letting him dictate anything. That's the whole point. I make my own choices now. every single one. nobody gets to.."

"your own choices?" she repeated it back to me in a tone that made it clear she had opinions about those choices. "is that what we're calling it?"

She was quiet for a moment and I should have taken that moment to leave. I should have said goodbye and walked out and let the silence be the end of it. But Carol's silences had never been empty. They were always loading something.

"You need to keep yourself," she said finally. "stop giving yourself away to every man that looks at you twice. keep yourself for someone who deserves it. the way you're going.." she stopped, and when she continued her voice had an edge that hadn't been there before, "every man in this town has had a piece of you, brielle. that's not freedom. that's just..you're making yourself into something disposable. a public convenience that anyone can just.."

"don't." my voice went flat and cold.

"I'm telling you the truth because nobody else will.."

"Your truth is the last thing I want to hear now, aunt Carol," I said.

"I'm your aunt and I raised you and I am telling you this path.."

"It's my life." I said it slowly and clearly. "my life. my body. my choices. you don't get a vote on any of it." I looked at her steadily. "And you want to talk about choices? maybe focus on your own. Maybe focus on the fact that your husband left and you've been bitter about it ever since and the only person around to take that out on is me."

The kitchen went very quiet.

Carol's face changed.

"Maybe that's what this is actually about," I continued and I knew I had gone too far and I kept going anyway. "you don't get to enjoy anything so nobody else should? you're just jealous that i'm living a life you can't. because at least someone or rather people want me. At least…"

The slap came fast and sharp and landed on my left cheek before I had finished the sentence.

I didn't move.

I stood very still with my face turned slightly from the impact and the sting spreading across my cheekbone and the kitchen so silent I could hear the refrigerator hum.

Carol's hand was still raised. Her chest was rising and falling quickly and her eyes were bright in a way that looked like it was sitting right on the edge of tears and fury simultaneously.

"Don't you ever," she said, and her voice was shaking, "talk to me like that. I was there for you when nobody else was. when your mother left you here like you were something she could just put down and walk away from. I raised you. I fed you. I kept this roof over your head and I stayed when everyone else was gone and you do not get to stand before me and throw my life back in my face like it means nothing."

I said nothing.

"if it wasn't for me," she continued, quieter now but no less sharp, "you would have grown up in a home somewhere with strangers. You could have been tagged an orphan. you had nothing and nobody and i gave you everything i had and this is..?" her voice broke slightly and she pressed her lips together, "this is what i get?"

I looked at her.

at the woman who had braided my hair every Sunday until I was twelve. who had sat outside examination halls when i was sixteen with a bottle of water and a sandwich. who had learned to cook my favourite meal from a youtube video because she had never made it before and i had mentioned once offhand that i wanted to try it. who had cried quietly in her bedroom the night her husband left thinking i was asleep and didn't know.

I looked at her and I felt everything I always felt when it came to Carol, the love that was real and complicated and tangled up in resentment and gratitude and old pain that neither of us knew how to put down.

and then I said, very quietly, "maybe I would have preferred to be tagged an orphan."

I picked up my bag from where it had slipped off my shoulder.

"brielle.."

The drive to Zara's took forty five minutes and I spent all of them with the window down and the radio off and my left cheek still faintly stinging and my chest doing the complicated thing it always did after a fight with Carol where I couldn't tell what proportion was anger and what proportion was something sadder that I didn't want to look at directly.

I loved my aunt.

That was the thing nobody would understand from the outside looking in. I loved her and she drove me absolutely insane. She had been the only constant in my life for as long as I could remember and sometimes those three things existed simultaneously and there was nothing clean or simple about any of it.

My mother had left me with Carol when I was barely old enough to remember anything and according to everything Carol had ever told me it had been a choice. A deliberate one. A woman who looked at the baby she had made and decided there were things she wanted more.

I had stopped being angry about it around the time I was seventeen. Or I had stopped letting myself be angry about it which was not exactly the same thing but was close enough to function.

Carol had been my mother in every way that counted. Even when she slapped me. Even when she said things that landed somewhere too deep to shake off quickly. Even when she looked at my life with that expression that made me feel like a problem she hadn't solved yet.

She was still the only mother I had ever known.

I just wished she would let me be who I was without making it feel like a personal failure.

I turned onto Zara's street and immediately noticed the cars.

There were three of them parked outside the house that hadn't been there yesterday. Two sedans and an SUV and as I pulled up and cut the engine I could see through the front window that the living room which was usually just Zara sprawled on the couch was full of people. Adults. Sitting in the particular arrangement that meant something was happening. 

I frowned.

Three people were coming out of the front door as I got out of the car, around my age, a girl and two guys, faces I didn't recognize.

I slipped past them and through the front door.

The living room. Four adults I didn't know sitting in the arrangement of people delivering news and Reid who barely looked at me.

I didn't stop to figure it out.

I went straight upstairs.

Zara's bedroom door was pushed almost closed and I could hear nothing from behind it which was somehow worse than any sound would have been. I pushed it open slowly.

She was on the bed face down with her head buried in her pillow and her shoulders doing the silent shaking thing that meant she had already been crying long enough that sound had stopped coming out.

"Z." I dropped my bag at the door, crossed the room, sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her back. "Hey. Hey, I'm here."

She moved. Pushed herself upright and turned and I saw her face and my chest tightened immediately because Zara's face in grief was something I had seen before; at a grandmother's funeral, at the end of a bad relationship, but this was different. This was definitely deeper. I pulled her in and she let me and I held her and said nothing because sometimes nothing was the only right thing and I knew her well enough to know when to wait.

Eventually she pulled back.

Sat up properly.

Looked at me with red eyes and a face that was still trying to find somewhere to put what it was carrying.

And then she said it.

"My mum's dead."

The words landed in the room like something physical.

I stared at her.

"What?"