Fanfare (Country Roads #2) - Chapter 18

I was still flying so high the next day from the gig, that it took me a while to realize Kat hadn’t come by like she said she would. While I wasn’t upset that I got out of studying, Kat had practically made a religion out of punctuality. I tried to call her a few times, but didn’t get any answer. I almost called Hanna, but by the time I decided something might be wrong, she was at work and I didn’t want to bother her when I didn’t actually know anything. I told myself that it might be unusual for Kat to be late, but that didn’t mean something had happened.

So I waited and paced the small trailer living room, getting more anxious with each lap, playing over potential scenarios in my head. Maybe her dad had come back unexpectedly and realized she’d been going out. Maybe Aaron had decided he wasn’t ready to give her up after all and had gone to her house looking for her. Maybe criminals had heard her dad was out of town and picked her house for a home invasion.

Okay, the last one was a bit of a stretch, but my brain was spiraling out of control as I worried, in between calling her every five minutes and leaving an increasingly manic series of voice mails. I knew what time Hanna got off work and watched the clock, waiting until I could call for help. I had practice with Chef and Willie and an early gig tonight, but there should be enough time for Hanna to come get me and the two of us to swing by Kat’s house and check on her.

“Kat didn’t show up,” I said as soon as Hanna got off work and I called her.

“What?”

“Kat said she was going to come tutor me today, and she never showed. I called a bunch of times, but she didn’t answer.”

“Ohh,” Hanna said, her voice suddenly matching my concern.

“Can you come get me and let’s go check on her?”

“I’m out the door,” she said, hanging up.

I had to hand it to Hanna; in a crisis she didn’t waste time talking or being dramatic. She just went into action. I was sitting on the front steps when Hanna came tearing up to my house. I leapt off the steps, launching myself at her door, and was in the car almost as soon as it came to a stop.

“Any word,” Hanna asked as I got into the car.

“Not yet, let’s …” I started to say when Hanna’s phone dinged.

She’d just started pulling forward and stopped again, pulling out her phone and checking it.

“It’s Katherine. She says she’s fine and she’ll see us later.”

“What? Nothing about why she didn’t show up and why she didn’t answer?”

“Nope. Just she’s fine and she’ll see us later.”

“Should we still go over there, just in case,” I asked.

“No. We heard back from her and she says she’s fine, so let’s just give her some space.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you rush down here.”

“It’s fine. I was worried too, 'cause this isn’t like her. I take it you need a ride?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you need your stuff,” she said, nodding at my empty lap and hands.

I’d rushed out of the house without my change of clothes for after I worked out with Chef or my guitar.

“Ohh, yeah,” I said, sheepishly. “Sorry, I’m a little jumpy I guess.”

Hanna backed up, pulling in front of my trailer.

“It’s okay. If I were her, I’d be happy to know that I had someone looking out for me like that. Grab your stuff and let’s get going.”

Willie was up on the porch waiting for us when we got to the Blue Ridge.

“Eugene called me,” Willie said when I walked up the steps towards him. “He said you did a hell of a job, although he told me you were going to poach his musicians?”

“I thought you said Seth was going to talk to him,” Hanna said, turning on me.

“He did,” I said, suddenly worried for a whole new reason. “They said they didn’t think it’d be a problem and that they’d ask him, just to be sure. Ahh, I screwed up. I should have done it myself. Stupid mistake. Should I call him and apologize?”

Willie broke into a grin and said, “No, you’re fine. He just wanted me to pull your chain. So the guys you played with were good?”

“Yeah. We worked really well together and Marco, the keyboard player, made some really good suggestions. I hadn’t even thought about needing keys on some of my songs, but they really do add a lot, especially to Country Roads. I wasn’t thinking all three of them though, just the drummer and the keyboard player.”

“The bass player was an ass. He tried to make a move on me, pinning me against a wall and trying to put a hand up my shirt, while Charlie was talking to the other two about joining his band.”

“He did what?!” I demanded.

“Calm down Rambo, I handled him. He’s probably still trying to dig his nuts out of his abdomen.”

Willie chuckled at our byplay and asked, “Are you sure you want to pick the first two guys you played with? I’ve seen a lot of rookie musicians stick with the first guys he meets, instead of taking the time to find the right people.”

“I don’t know; that’s why I wanted them to come up and do a short audition with me for you, so you could see if they were a good pick. I’ve never put a band together, so I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but we worked well together. They made a lot of good suggestions and didn’t get upset when I said no to suggestions I didn’t think would work. Really, our rehearsal was a lot like the rehearsals here, and we got along. Well, except for Rodney the bass player, but they didn’t seem to like him very much either.”

“They did sound good,” Hanna added.

“Okay, if y’all think they might work, I’ll give ’em a listen. When were you thinking?”

“Next Saturday, before the lunch rush. Seth said he had a gig filling in for a band’s regular drummer Saturday night, so he’s got to get back in time.”

“Yeah, I can make that work. Let them know. What are you going to do about a bass player? You’re going to need one.”

“Seth said he knew a guy.”

“Just be sure before you start doin’ any regular gigs. If you’re gonna make it work for the scout your teacher set up, you’re gonna need to get comfortable on stage together, or it’ll show. You don’t have time to do gigs with guys that aren’t gonna last.”

“I will,” I said, and then we all stopped as a car pulled up hard right in front of the restaurant.

As the dust from the gravel parking lot cleared I was surprised to see it was Kat.

“Is everything okay?” I asked as soon as she ran up the steps.

“Yes, sorry. I know you were worried and I got your messages. All of them.”

Hanna turned and gave me a look and I gave her a ‘what can you do’ shoulder shrug in return.

“It’s fine; it’s nice having people worry about me. Can we go somewhere and sit down and talk?”

“Sure. Does it need to be just me?”

“No, Hanna can come too.”

“I’m too old for whatever drama you kids got cookin’, so take it out back,” Willie said.

I held my tongue until we got through the restaurant and out the back door.

“What happened? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all day. I was worried sick.”

“I know, and I’m really sorry,” Kat said. “I had to use my phone so I could loop through cell network IPs to keep from getting my login script from getting blocked by DDOS protection most cloud storage company’s use.”

“What?” I asked, looking at Hanna.

“Don’t ask me. When she goes all geek-speak, she always loses me.”

“I missed something. What were you doing?”

“I was watching video of your fight with Aaron,” she said, beaming.

“What? How? Where?” I said, now completely off-kilter.

“Who? When?” Hanna said, smirking at me.

I glared at her. Sometimes her sense of humor flared up at the most inconvenient times.

“Back up to the beginning and explain what you’ve been doing,” I said.

“Okay, so I was thinking it was weird that there was no video of your fight. I mean, I know the school doesn’t have cameras, but every kid has a camera in their phone and starts recording any time anything interesting pops up. Did you know there’s a video out there of you and Harry arguing in the locker room after your last game?”

“Coach’ll flip if he finds out someone was recording in the locker room. They made it clear in the code of conduct we signed that you could get kicked off the team for that.”

“I don’t think that’s her point,” Hanna said.

“Yeah. Okay, so everyone has a phone. So what, there wasn’t anyone in the parking lot when I fought Aaron.”

“Yes, there was. There were four people in the parking lot, besides you, in fact.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked.

“I started thinking about it a while ago. Dad was home, so I wasn’t allowed to go out, and I was surfing the internet, kind of bored. Did you know there’s a Checkerboard dedicated to our school?”

“A what?”

“Checker. You don’t use it?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it’s some kind of website or tech thing. We only have the free Wi-Fi that the community has, and it sucks hard, so I hardly ever use the internet except when I’m at school or Hanna’s house.”

“It’s a place where people post messages and respond to them about … well, everything. There are different boards you can post on about specific subjects, from like, movies to special interests to towns and so on.”

“And our school has one of these.”

“Well, the school doesn’t run it. It’s not like a blog or anything. It was probably set up by a student, although it seems unlikely the administration doesn’t know about it. Kids talk about gossip, classes, teachers, post videos. Whatever.”

“Okay, so there’s a place where people from our school post stuff on the internet.”

“You’ve got it. Anyway, I was going through it and I was thinking about all the videos everyone had. It’s like anything even the least bit interesting that happens in school, someone takes a video of it and posts it.”

“And a video of my fight was on there?”

“No, it’s just what got me thinking about it. So I was thinking about it and then started thinking about the parking lot and how it’s never completely empty, even an hour after school gets out. So I … uhh … found out whose cell phones were in the parking lot that afternoon when your fight happened.”

“How?” I asked, skeptically. “You didn’t do anything that’ll get you in trouble?”

“No or, at least, not if they don’t catch me.”

“Kat!” I said in warning.

“You’re wasting your breath. She loves this kind of thing. Sometimes when we’re waiting on your practice to end, she’ll go on about the thing she hacked into. I swear it’s her only addiction.”

“It’s not hacking. I mean, not really. I didn’t actually break any encryption on their systems or anything. People are just really bad at passwords. As long as you know someone who has access to a system and has enough of a social media presence, you can usually find out their passwords, especially if they’re in admin or something non-technical. I just found out someone’s login to the back end of the cell system, so it’s not really hacking.”

“It’s probably illegal though,” I said, still not dropping my displeasure.

I didn’t have a problem with people breaking laws, per se. It was more Kat specifically, since if she did something bad enough to end up in jail, it would go very badly.

“Anyway, I followed a bunch of kids’ phone and GPS histories and several were in the parking lot, or pretty close to it, when you had your fight. They aren’t exact, so some of them were probably just inside the building, close enough to get picked up, but not where they could actually see you.”

“Okay, I’m still not clear how that got you a video of the fight.”

“I’m getting there. Once I had a list, I started thinking about where they’d have saved the video if they took it, working backward from most common cloud storage systems to least common. A lot of phones are made by companies that have deals with cloud storage people, so it isn’t all that much work to check and see if these guys have accounts.”

“I’m afraid to even ask how you were able to check their accounts.”

“Like I said, it’s not hard if someone is only a newbie, and has social media. It’s easier with kids in high school and college, since everyone’s connected and shares literally everything in their life online. It’s just a process of elimination. All you have to do is set up the likely parameters and the sites you want to check and have it loop through all of their login systems, trying each one.”

“Which is why your cell phone was busy,” Hanna said.

“Exactly. It took a few days, ’cause some of them had a ton of files in their storage, and I had to go through all of the videos and pictures by hand. I considered trying to make some kind of algorithm to sort through them, but then I’d have to get a hold of facial recognition software, which would have …”

“Kat,” I said, interrupting her.

“Anyway, I went through all of them, and I found a video of the fight. It wasn’t a great angle, and it lost you when the two of you fell to the ground, but it shows Aaron attacking you first.”

“Why didn’t this kid post it? Everything else in this school gets posted, but the one video I’d need to end this nonsense this kid just filed away and forgot about it.”

“He could have been scared. You might not be intimidated by Aaron, but a lot of kids here are. Everyone knows who his dad is and how he protects Aaron, letting him get away with pretty much everything. Anyone who’s been in the same school as him for a few years knows to avoid him. Hell, even people like Chris Hume, who could kick his ass and was as popular as him, tended to just avoid him instead. It’s why you got under his skin so much, since you stood up to him.”

“Does it matter?” Kat asked. “We have the video now. You can prove you didn’t attack him.”

“You know what … you’re right,” I said, picking Kat up and swinging her around. “You’re amazing.”

She laughed and threw her arms around me, clinging tight and burying her head in my shoulder. She was still grinning as I put her back down. She hadn’t smiled much since the thing with her dad, so it was great to see her happy again, even if it was only for a few minutes.

“Can you send me the video?”

“Yep,” she said, taking her phone back from Hanna, who’d grabbed it when I’d picked Kat up.

I’d have to use Chef’s computer to forward it on to Mr. Eaves, but this was the first time since the whole lawsuit business started that I actually felt like I could see a way out.

Chef came out and chased them off, but not even his gruff, all-business manner during training could ruin the euphoria I was feeling, knowing the whole episode would soon be behind me.

As soon as practice ended I hurried up to Chef’s apartment, with his permission of course, and sent the emails to Mr. Eaves. I knew I’d have to wait for a reply, but knowing it didn’t make the experience feel any less like an eternity. The one-sentence reply I finally got a day later confirming he got it and saying he’d look into it did dampen my enthusiasm quite a bit. To be fair, I wasn’t actually paying him and he had other clients who were, so I probably didn’t rate immediate responses. Besides, he also had to go over the video and verify it, or whatever.

It was just tough to be this close to being done with the whole thing and not be able to do anything proactively. Despite all of the times Chef had lectured me on the need for patience; it wasn’t one of the things I excelled at.

So it was driving me crazy, having to study, go to class, practice with Chef, and basically just live my life, hanging in limbo. Kat tried her best to keep my mind off it by making me study algebra every night after I finished at the Blue Ridge, which I didn’t love but did appreciate at least the thought behind it.

Hanna finally helped pull my head out of my ass on Thursday.

“Either you stop moping or you walk from now on,” she said as we were on the way to school. “I get it, the video’s a big deal, but you sent it to your lawyer. He’ll do what he has to do. You can’t keep being an ass because you’re impatient.”

“I just want him to email me back and tell me ‘this’ll get the case dismissed,’ so I know and can get on with my life.”

“When he can, he will. Chef said he was good, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then have some faith. We both knew this was the game changer when Kat showed us, so you know the case is going to get dismissed. So what does it matter if he emails you to tell you? You’re not a little kid who needs his hand held through every little thing. This kind of stuff takes time, so just accept it’ll eventually get cleared up and move on. Or walk, it’s your call.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll stop being an ass.”

She was right, of course. I’d even told myself the same thing, but maybe I just needed someone to hit me upside the head and force me to listen.

“On a side note, Kat drove today cause she’s going to take you to the Blue Ridge. I have to go home right after school.”

“Why? I mean, sure, that’s no problem. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. I got some acceptance letters back, and Mom wants to look at FASA loans and stuff. I didn’t get any scholarships, so we need to see what each college will cost and how much their loan programs will cover and how much they expect us to pay out of pocket. There’s a crazy amount of paperwork.”

“Sounds fun. Any idea which college you want to go to yet?”

“No. Most of them are in state, and there’s a good chance I’ll go to one of those just because of price, but Mom wanted to get an idea of what we’ll actually need to pay for each one before we narrow it down, since I don’t have a preference otherwise.”

“Okay. Good luck I guess.”

Lunch was more of the same. Most of the seniors were either talking about the colleges they got accepted to or the various scholarships and loan stuff they had to go over. I didn’t fault them for it, since it was the start of a whole new journey for all of them, but I was still a couple of years away from having to deal with any of it, and after playing the previous weekend, it all seemed so far away and unnecessary. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I’d started on that journey that they were all just about to get started on. Even when I went to college, because I knew Mom wouldn’t accept anything less, it would be a formality. I might learn some stuff, but it wasn’t going to be the thing that determined my next step. If anything, it’s a delay in getting there.

At least at practice, everyone was focused on baseball. I spent most of the time in the batting cages, working on my swing and trying to get the precision hitting Coach Cooper was talking about. It felt like I wasn’t making much progress, but once again I was told I was being impatient. Coach kept pointing out this was a skill that would take years to master, and I shouldn’t expect to just be able to learn it. It took a lot of muscle memory and hundreds of hours of batting to be able to do it consistently.

I tried not to get frustrated at everyone telling me to be patient, but it was getting to me. I had to be patient about starting my life and music, patient to get the lawsuit ended, patient in baseball, and so on and so on.

“Sometimes, you have to just do the work and not worry about the future,” Kat said when I voiced the thought to her as we left the gym and walked to her car.

“So you’re going to just throw my words back at me, huh,” I said, annoyed.

I regretted my tone as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

“No, but it was good advice. It’s been hard knowing what’s wrong with me and not being able to do anything about it. I know that, eventually, we’ll find someone who can help me learn how to deal with my condition, but I have to be patient and wait for that. Getting upset because my brain’s always fighting against me only makes it harder. You remind me about that all the time. It just sounded like this was something similar.”

She said it timidly, but she’d gotten it out. I don’t think she realized how much progress she was making, even without the therapy that she needed. She might not be able to do it in high-stress situations or with other people, but she’d started to be able to stand her ground against me, which was a good sign that she could get better, if she put in the work and was patient.

Of course, that was exactly what I was raging against doing for myself.

“You’re right. I guess it’s easy to give that advice and a whole lot harder to …”

“Hey, faggot,” a voice called out behind me.

I sighed and turned to see Harry walking towards me. I’d been avoiding him since the locker incident, since I had enough troubles with Aaron’s lawsuit, I didn’t need any more hassles. He’d made a few plays at me since then, but the coaches had always been around, keeping anything from happening. He apparently had been waiting for his moment, because there were only a few other kids in the parking lot with no faculty in sight.

Thankfully, Kat was thinking ahead and pulled out her phone, recording as Harry stormed towards me. At least this time, I’d have proof upfront.

“Harry, I don’t want any trouble. Let’s just both go our separate ways and call it a day. Okay?”

“What? You’re too scared to see if you can take me.”

I just couldn’t figure out what Harry was actually trying to accomplish. If he was less of an idiot, I’d assume he was trying to set himself up to be able to sue me like Aaron was doing, but Harry didn’t plan that far ahead. Besides, he didn’t even glance towards Kat, who was clearly filming what was happening. Aaron would be gone next year and Harry clearly wanted to take his place as top douchebag. Their friend Paul was also a junior, but he’d struck me as being comfortable being the follower. Apparently, kicking my ass when Aaron hadn’t been able to was what he thought he needed to do to set himself up to take over from Aaron.

It was almost certainly why he’d been trying to provoke me since school started up again. Apparently, he’d got tired of that tactic not working and decided for a more direct approach.

“Sure, I’m scared. Can we be done with this now?”

“Hell no, we’re not done. You still think you’re hot shit, and someone needs to show you that you suck.”

Harry was nothing if not a wordsmith.

“I’m not going to fight you, Harry.”

“Then you’ll just get your ass kicked,” he said, reaching back and taking the wildest and most telegraphed swing I’d ever seen.

I easily intercepted it and pushed his hand away, causing him to stumble to one side.

“Harry, don’t do this,” I said, turning and continuing to back away from him.

He had some of his new buddies from varsity with him, but they were standing back and letting Harry handle things, so at least I didn’t have to worry about them for the time being.

“Son of a …” he started to say, turning and charging again and I dodged him again, this time hooking my foot around his back ankle and giving it a little tug.

It wasn’t enough to cause him to drop headfirst on the pavement, since I was trying very hard to not actually hurt him, but it was enough to cause him to stumble forward.

“Harry, if you keep trying, someone’s going to get hurt.”

“That’s the point,” he said, coming again.

He at least seemed to learn his lesson and stopped charging, choosing to stand back and take swings. I blocked one, and then the other, backing off each time. I’d given him enough chances. If I kept trying to keep from engaging, he was going to end up getting lucky. Chef would probably be on my ass if he heard I’d delayed this long, letting him get in so many free shots. The video would make it pretty clear I’d done everything I could do to deescalate the situation.

“Last chance, Harry. Back off or you’re not going to leave me any choice.”

“Fuck … you,” he said, each word punctuated with a punch that I blocked.

I’d warned him. The second punch I redirected, giving my left hand a straight shot. I gave him a short jab to the nose, with enough force to stagger him, but not enough to knock him down. He stumbled, a surprised look on his face as blood began streaming down his nose. It seemed impossible after a full minute of not being able to lay a finger on me that he thought he’d still be able to win this, but Harry had never been blessed with an abundance of brains.

As he stumbled back, his arms flailed out, leaving the entire center mass of his body exposed. I punched out with my right fist, twisting my waist to put power into it, driving my fist into the area near his solar plexus, just between his sternum and the top of his stomach. I could hear the air leave his lungs in a rush, and he stumbled back, falling on his butt.

He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, desperately trying to take in a lung full of hair. His friends rushed to him, leaning over him, trying to figure out what they were going to do. I signaled to Kat to keep filming, I needed proof that he wasn’t seriously hurt, just in case.

“Give him a second. I just knocked the wind out of him,” I said, although as he started to turn blue, I got worried that maybe I’d aimed wrong and done some real damage.

It was one thing to be told places to hit a person to cause specific damage and practice those moves on a training post, and another to hit a person. I was about to tell Kat to run for help when he finally managed to take in a big breath, the color returning to his face.

I waved Kat to turn off the video when he started to mumble curses in my direction, although still doubled over in pain.

“I know you well enough to know you’re going to try and follow in Aaron’s footsteps. If any of your friends here get the idea that they want to try and give statements backing up whatever’s brewing in that misshapen lump of a head, I hope they remember that lying to the police is a crime, and we have video where I asked you several times to stop before I defended myself. Let’s go.”

The last thing was directed at Kat as I backed away from them, just in case his friends decided to get brave. Thankfully, they were either concerned about Harry or suddenly worried they might get drawn into something more than a parking lot fight, and all stayed where they were.

“That was awesome,” Kat said as we got in her car. “You kept him swinging until you had proof then pow, dropped him to the ground.”

“It wasn’t awesome and I really was trying to get him to back off without causing problems. Even though we have the video, he could still get the bright idea to try and call the cops or sue me. His dad isn’t a lawyer and I don’t think they’re that well off, so a lawsuit would hurt them as much as me, but sometimes people don’t think that far ahead when something happens to their kids. We got lucky getting a lawyer to represent us for free, and I’m worried that we won’t get that again, which is why I was trying to not hurt him.”

“I still think it was fun watching him get his.”

Sometimes it was easy to forget that Kat had a lot more experience with Harry than I did. It was easy to think about all the shit that Aaron did to her while she was ‘dating’ him, but Harry was around for most of that, and knowing him, he was probably equally difficult. She’d been reluctant to share much of the details of what Aaron and his friends had done to her, and I’d been reluctant to push her on it.

“Did he ever … uh, hurt you or anything?”

“No,” she said, meekly. “Aaron was not big on sharing and the rest of them were too scared to cross him. It was only near the end that he started trying to have me spend time with his friends, since I guess he was bored of me or whatever. I watched him say a lot of stuff to other girls, mostly all repeats of stuff he’d heard Aaron say. I guess I just don’t like him.”

“Me either,” I said, reaching down and holding her hand.

Whenever we did talk about Aaron, she got really vulnerable and I could hear her voice wavering, so I wanted to comfort her. She squeezed my hand back and held on tight, but didn’t say anything else.

I didn’t press her, and just rode in silence, holding her hand, and she drove me to the Blue Ridge. We pulled in, a little farther back from the door than usual, and I turned to see if she was coming inside, when she unhooked her seatbelt and practically leapt at me, her lips smashing into mine.

I was studded into inaction for a moment when I felt her tongue try to push past my lips. That was enough to get my brain to kick into gear. I leaned back and pushed her into her seat. It was harder than I would have thought until I remember she was an athlete and probably in better shape than I was.

I did manage to get her to back off enough to say something.

“No. Kat, stop,” I got out before she could try again.

“What … I …” she stammered before slumping back in her seat and turning away from me so I couldn’t see her face.

We’d found a good equilibrium over the last few months, but I should have seen this coming. This was all very reminiscent of the last time she’d tried to make a move on me, and I should have realized that she’d have a problem separating giving me control over her decisions and some kind of more total submission that neither of us would have been ready for.

“Kat,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder.

She flinched and tried to pull away, but I held on tight.

“Look at me,” I commanded.

She hesitated for a second and then turned. Tears were already starting to make their way down her cheeks.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I love you,” she said.

“Kat, you know I really care about you, but …”

She shifted on a dime, her voice becoming angry. I’d done some reading about her condition and I knew people who suffered from DPD sometimes had manic episodes when things spiraled out of control, but reading about that and experiencing it were very different things.

“But you don’t love me, right? It’s because I’m broken, right? You’d rather go out with someone like Rhonda than me, even though she slept with the guy you hated most in the world, but I’d give you everything, and you don’t want me. Why? Would it be so bad?”

She steadily got louder with each word until she was screaming by the end.

“Kat, I do love you. You’re one of my best friends, but you know this wouldn’t work, not right now. When I talked to Dr. Rothstein, he warned me not to let you get too attached, because it would make your recovery much harder. I didn’t see a choice when I told you I was taking control of you, but we have a choice now. Eventually, we’re going to get you the help you need, and I want you to have a chance to get free from this. You’re an amazing person and you deserve to be able to be your own person.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to be my own person, I want to be yours,” she said, crying again as her mania swung back in the other direction.

“I know. Right now, that probably seems like the right decision, and I’m sure for a while, that’d be easier. In the long run, I think it would make any kind of relationship impossible. A caregiver and dependent relationship are really different than a relationship between romantic partners, even if they aren’t equals. Can you tell your feelings of obligation and submission from love? Could you separate wanting to belong to me and wanting to be my partner?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because they aren’t the same thing. You are seeing me from what I can do for you and how I can make you feel. Does that sound like a good relationship to you? Think about the good relationships you’ve seen, is that what they’re like?”

“I don’t know.”

“They aren’t. Both people need to get something out of a relationship and both people need to want to give something to their partner. That isn’t what this is. Right now, we are at an imbalance. I’m in charge and you follow. That’s what you need right now to keep from getting into trouble, and I’m happy to be that person for you, but that isn’t how you can start a relationship. Can you understand that?”

“I guess,” she whispered.

“You know I’m not trying to hurt you. I want you to be the best person you can be, which means we have to make sure you get better.”

“I know,” she said, and then fell silent.

I could tell she wanted to say something, so I waited, trying to give her the time she needed to get her thoughts or the courage together to say it.

“Do you think …” she started to say and then paused.

“Go ahead. I won’t be upset no matter what you ask.”

“Do you think maybe, one day, if I can stop being so … this, you might want to be with me?”

“Of course. You’re drop-dead gorgeous and the smartest girl I know, but you know that one day might not come, right? I’m not saying we won’t get you help and you won’t get better, because I won’t stop trying until that happens, but we don’t know what the future will bring. Maybe you’ll fall in love with someone. Maybe I will. We can’t predict life, and making decisions on a hypothetical someday is just setting both of us up for disaster.”

“I guess,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“What I can promise is to be your friend and to love you as a friend for now. Can that be enough?”

She was quiet for several minutes. I knew Chef was probably wondering what happened to me, but I couldn’t leave her without getting things without at least making sure she would be okay.

“I don’t think I’ll ever want anyone else, but I don’t want to keep you from being happy.”

“You don’t. You being my friend is one of the things that make me happy. I couldn’t imagine not being friends with you, which is why I’m worried about messing things up.”

“So you’re just looking after me?”

“It’s what I do,” I said, leaning in and giving her a big hug. “Now, let’s go inside. After I finish I want to swing by Hanna’s so you can tell her about Harry getting knocked on his ass.”