Unbroken

his attention to me. “I don’t know why you bother, the realtor I spoke to said she can have someone pack everything up and trash it.”
    “There’s things there I want to keep.” I clench my fists under the table. “Photographs, books, mum’s stuff. You want to just throw all that away?” My voice is accusing, loud in the dining room.
    “I’m sure your dad just means, he doesn’t want you feeling burdened.” Daniel interrupts, answering for him. He rests a hand on my shoulder. “And he’s right. You said yourself, it’s hard seeing everything again.”
    “That doesn’t mean it’s not worth saving.” I feel a spike of anger again. “I still don’t understand why we have to sell the place. It’s been in mom’s family for years.”
    “Oh god, not this again.” Carina rolls her eyes, reaching for her wine. “We’re been through it. It’s a run-down shack in the middle of nowhere. What’s the point of hanging on to the past?”
    “Because it matters.” I cry. “How can you say that? Don’t you care about all the memories of mom?”
    “Those aren’t the only memories you have there.” Carina gives me a spiteful smile, and I freeze in panic. She’s going to bring up Emerson right now?
    But my dad interrupts before she can say anything. “I know you have an attachment to the place, but it’s time to put away childish things.” he says, patronizing. “The realtor says we can get a good price if we sell now.”
    “Actually, she says we’d do better if we wait.” I can’t help but point out. “What’s the rush, anyway? Did you blow another loan skiing in Aspen? Or are the debt collectors finally after you?”
    There’s a shocked silence. I don’t usually come right out and say things like this, but I’m on edge right now, and sick of all this dancing around the truth.
    “That’s hardly dinner-table conversation,” my dad replies, but his lips are pressed tightly together, and he looks mad as hell.
    Good.
    “He’s right,” Daniel lets out an awkward laugh. “How about we talk about something else? Alexander, how are things at the office? You said you had a new client.”
    Daniel steers them into mindless small-talk again, and I feel him relax beside me, like disaster has been averted. But I sit frozen in my seat, every muscle I have tensed hard and angry. I want to scream at him, or shake him, anything to make him notice the years of silent bullshit lurking in this room. But it’s no use. He just doesn’t see, how supremely fucked up my family is. Sure, we’re fine on the surface, but everything underneath is broken and rotted.
    Ugly.
    Emerson understood. He knew there are a thousand different ways to be crazy. His family were the loud, fucked-up kind. Trailer trash, he called himself, like it was a fact. His mom was an addict—still is, I guess. She dipped in and out of rehab and twelve-step programs for years, but always came undone in the end. She took off for good with some asshole when he was eighteen, leaving him with two younger siblings to raise. I guess compared to that, my family problems were a luxury, but Emerson never saw it like that.
    The way he put it, hurt is hurt, pain is pain, and crazy is crazy. Doesn’t matter if someone’s getting drunk off cheap tequila or expensive wines, or out sleeping with druggie assholes or douchebag lawyers to fill the emptiness inside. It’s all the same. And the damage they leave behind is just as bad.
    It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with him four years ago. I finally felt like someone could see the hurt inside me, could help me make peace with it. Before him, I wondered if I was doomed to turn out just like my family: pretending everything was fine even as we killed ourselves with hurt and denial. Emerson taught me, it was OK to be damaged: to take that hurt, and feel it, and make it drive you, to never wind up like them.
    So what the hell are you doing now? An accusing voice cuts through my thoughts. Look at you, biting your lip, and taking your pills, and acting like you can stand to even look at these people?
    You’re just like them.
    The thought shocks me bolt upright in my seat. I look around the table in horror. It can’t be true! I’m nothing like Carina and Dad, I swore it to myself, years ago. Just because I’m trying to keep all this bullshit away from my life with Daniel, it doesn’t mean I’m faking my way through a life of denial like them.
    But the whisper in the back of my mind