Twenty minutes later she responded: Me too, Janie. All of it.

ON SATURDAY WE walked down to the beach. “It’s not very creative,” I said as we picked our way over the root-laden path. Gus opened his mouth to reply and I cut him off. “Don’t you dare make a joke about my genre of choice being unoriginal.”

“I was going to say it’s stupid we haven’t come down here more,” Gus answered.

“I assumed you’d gotten sick of it, I guess.”

Gus shook his head. “I’ve barely used this beach.”

“Seriously?”

“Root,” he warned as I looked up at him, and I stepped carefully over it. “I’m not the world’s biggest beach guy.”

“Well, of course not,” I said. “If you were, you’d be wearing a T-shirt or a hat that advertised that.”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “Anyway, I actually prefer this beach in winter.”

“Really? Because in winter, I’d just prefer to be dead.”

Gus’s laugh rattled in his throat. He stepped off the wooded path onto the sand and offered me a hand as I hopped off the slight ledge. “It’s amazing. Have you ever seen it?”

I shook my head. “When I was at U of M, I pretty much stayed at U of M. I didn’t do much exploring.”

Gus nodded. “After Pete and Maggie moved here, I’d visit them for my winter break. They’d buy my plane or bus tickets as presents, and I’d come for the holidays.”

“I’m guessing your dad didn’t mind.” A sudden burst of anger at the thought of Gus as a kid, alone, unwanted, had forced the words out of me before I could stop. I glanced cautiously at him. His jaw was clenched a bit, but otherwise his face was impassive.

He shook his head. We’d fallen into step along the water and he looked sidelong at me, then back to the sand. “You don’t have to worry about bringing him up. It wasn’t that bad.”

“Gus.” I stopped and faced him. “Just the fact that you have to say it means it was way worse than it should’ve been.”

He hesitated a second, then started walking again. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “After my mom died, I could’ve gotten out. Pete wanted me to come live with her and Maggie. She was always trying to get me to—to talk about the fights he and I would get into, so she could get custody, but I chose not to. He had all this heart medication. Daily pills. He’d only take them if I asked him, like, three times, but God forbid I asked a fourth. He’d pick a fight. An actual fight. Sometimes I thought …” He trailed off. “I wondered if he wanted me to kill him. Or like, get himself so worked up his heart would give out. I dropped out of school to work so we could afford his prescriptions, but when I was out, he stopped doing anything for himself. Eating, bathing. I could barely keep him alive. Maybe he thought that would be my punishment.”

“Your punishment?” I choked out. “For what?”

Gus shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe being on her side all the time.”

“Your mom’s?”

He nodded. “I think he felt like it was Us against Him. It was Us against Him. He’d blame her for everything that went wrong—dumb shit, like, she’d forget to put gas in the car one night and he’d realize he needed to stop for it on his way to work, so he’d be late. Or she’d throw away a receipt he wanted to keep, dump leftovers out of the fridge a few hours before he finally decided he wanted them.

“He was bad with me too, but it was a little more random. If the phone rang and woke him up, he’d hit me, or if he had plans to go out but had to cancel for snow, he’d knock me around to burn off his anger. I was always looking for the secret code, the rules I could follow so he wouldn’t freak out. That’s how you keep yourself safe, you know? You pay attention to how the world works. But there was no secret code for him. It was like our actions were entirely detached from his reactions to us. He acted like I was this lazy, selfish brat and like my mom thought she was a queen. Like she treated his money like toilet paper. She was constantly apologizing for nothing, and then when he’d really hurt her, or me, he’d apologize. Back off for a few days.

“Even with all that, I think losing her broke whatever was left in him. I don’t know.” He paused, thinking. “Maybe it wasn’t love. Maybe treating her like shit made him feel like he had power. He didn’t have that with me as I got older.”

“Making you keep him alive was the only way left to manipulate you,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe. But if I’d left, he would’ve died sooner.”

“And you think that would’ve been your fault?”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it would’ve been. He would’ve been dead, and I would’ve known I could’ve stopped it. Plus, she didn’t leave. How could I, knowing it wasn’t what she would have wanted?”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “You were a kid.”

“Pete likes to say I was never a kid.”

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Don’t act like I’m pitiful,” he said. “It’s in the past. It’s over.”

“You know what your problem is?” I asked, and this time when I stopped, he did too.

“I’m aware of several, yes.”

“You don’t know the difference between pity and sympathy,” I said. “I’m not pitying you. It makes me sad to think of you being treated like that. It makes me mad to think you didn’t have the things all kids deserve. And yeah, it makes me mad and sad that a lot of people go through the things you went through, but it’s even more upsetting because it’s you. And I know you and I like you and I want you to have a good life. That’s not pity. That’s caring about someone.”

He stared at me intently, then shook his head. “I don’t want you to think about me like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like an angry, broken punching bag,” he said, his face dark and tense.

“I don’t.” I took a step closer, searching for the right words. “I just think of you as Gus.”

He studied me. The corner of his mouth twitched into an unconvincing smile, then faded, leaving him looking burned-out. “I am, though,” he said quietly. “I am angry and messed up, and every time I try to get closer to you, it’s like all these warning bells go off, and I try to act like a normal person, but I can’t.”

My stomach flip-flopped. Closer to you. I glanced at the lake while I got my bearings. “I thought you understood that there’s no such thing as a normal person.”

“Maybe not,” Gus said. “But there’s still a difference between people like me and people like you, January.”

“Don’t insult me.” I looked sharply back at him. “Don’t you think I’m angry? Don’t you think I feel a little bit broken? It’s not like my life’s been perfect either.”

“I have never thought your life was perfect,” he said.

“Bullshit. You called me a fairy princess.”

He coughed out a laugh. “Because you’re the bright light! Don’t you get it?” He shook his head. “It’s not about what’s happened. It’s about how you cope with things, who you are. You’ve always been this fierce fucking light, and even when you’re at your worst, when you feel angry and broken, you still know how to be a person. How to tell people you—you love them.”

“Stop it,” I said. He started to walk away, but I grabbed him by the elbows and held him in front of me. “You’re not going to break me, Gus.”

He stilled, his lips parting and his eyes searching my face for something. His head just slightly tilted and those grooves rose from the inside corners of his brows.

I hoped that what he was understanding right then was that I saw him. That he didn’t have to do anything special, figure out a mysterious code to unlock the secret parts of him. That he just had to keep being here with me, letting me discover him bit by bit like he’d been doing with me since we met.

“I don’t need you to tell me you care about me,” I said finally. “Two nights ago you held me while I sobbed. I think I blew my nose on your shirt. I’m not asking you for anything except to return the favor in whatever underwhelming and mild equivalent of lap-weeping you need.”