When You Were Here

in the dark. I would speak first, telling her the truth—thatI’m still totally in love with her. That nothing has changed for me when it comes to her.
    Everything else is so muted, so fuzzy, so frayed around the edges. This—how I feel for Holland—is the only thing in my life that has remained the same. Everyone I have loved is gone. Except her. Holland is the before and the after, and the way I feel for her is both lethal and beautiful. It is like breathing, like a heartbeat.
    She would say the same words back to me, that she feels the same. Then she would say my name, like she’s been searching for something, like she’s found the thing she’s been looking for.
    Come find me, come find me, come find me.

    In the morning, I find her in my kitchen making toast.
    “I am the world’s deepest sleeper,” she announces by way of a greeting. “I did not wake up once all night.”
    I say nothing, just sit down at the counter on one of the stools.
    “I don’t think I even realized I fell asleep. I just woke up this morning all disoriented and then I was like, Oh, I fell asleep on Danny’s couch .”
    The toast pops up, and she begins to spread butter on it.
    “But thank you. For letting me fall asleep here.”
    “Right.”
    She hands me a plate. I look at the toast like it’s a foreign substance. I don’t eat it.
    “Are you hungry?”
    “No.”
    “Oh.”
    I push the plate back to her.
    “Sorry,” she says, and looks down at the plate, staring hard at the toast like it holds secrets. Then she fiddles with her star ring, twisting it one way, then the other.
    “Why do you wear that still?”
    She looks up, surprised that I’ve had the guts to ask her a real question for once.
    “No, really. What’s the point, Holland? Just take off the ring.”
    She shakes her head.
    “Seriously. Take it off. You don’t need it anymore. Take the star off and throw it out.”
    She swallows hard and presses her lips together, as if she is holding back both words and tears. But I can’t care about her anymore. I can’t keep pretending that I’ve forgotten what we had. Because I haven’t, but I can’t have her the way I want her. And seeing her here and acting like we’re all fine hurts too much. I’ve got to make the hurting stop.
    “I don’t want to throw it out,” she says. “Okay? I just don’t. And if you’d just—”
    “Why are you here then? You could have left this morning. You didn’t need to make me breakfast. I’ve been makingtoast since I was eight. I didn’t have to start making toast when my mom died, okay?”
    “Danny,” she says, and the look on her face is soft, and it’s sad, and it has to be a harbinger of more pity from her.
    “Why did you leave me, Holland? After everything, how could you do it? How could you do it and then just keep showing up like nothing ever happened between us? Because I don’t want to just go to the movies with you and eat takeout in my kitchen, and I don’t want to find you on my couch in the morning. Don’t you get it? I can’t just pretend with you.”
    She looks hard at me, her blue eyes steely around the edges. “I do get it. But there are things that you don’t get, and if you’d let me—”
    But I feel stronger for the first time in weeks, and lashing out at her feels so good, it feels like survival. “I don’t want to go back to being best friends with you. But you’re like a disease. You’re always around, and you’re always showing up, and you act like nothing’s changed, but everything’s changed, and you—you’re like a cancer.”
    The words come out without warning, too quickly for me to stop them, too fast for me to abort.
    I watch as her shoulders drop, her eyes lower, the thing I just called her fully registering. She speaks in the lowest possible voice, so low it’s a barrier to protect herself from me. “I can’t believe you really just said that.”
    Neither can I. But I know if I open my mouth again, any ounce of self-preservation left in me will wither.
    I stare at my plate of uneaten, cold toast as she grabs her book and her black shoulder bag and gives Sandy Koufax a quick pat on the way out before pulling the door closed behind her.
    There is nothing, nothing but smoke and dust and debris, here for me in California. The only choice I have, the only chance I have, is to leave.

Chapter Nine
    We adopted Sandy Koufax two years ago, and she’s named after the greatest pitcher ever, a lefty like me, and a