DRAG - [h.s. au]

62*

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You've got a heart from heaven

But you're burning like hell

Happy I took a chance on you

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BENTLEY

It's hard to believe, but I finally felt like a weight had been lifted from my chest. I didn't plan on telling Harry yet, or at all, really, but a part of me is glad he knows.

He knows everything now.

He knows about my heart and he knows I love him, and somehow, that means everything to me.

We had things to talk about, obviously, and I knew it would be a hard conversation, but if we didn't have it now, then we'd get caught in the crossfire of it all.

We drove back to the building side by side, keeping the same speed and everything after he suggested we get out of the shop's ashes. He kept his distance too, and I could tell he was itching to touch me after I told him I loved him too.

He texted everyone that we were okay, back at the apartment, and then shut his phone down. Mine was back at my place and we were sitting in his apartment now.

The pages that had fallen out were organized neatly on the floor, and I had to tiptoe across to not put anything out of order. There was a method to his madness.

"Harry." I start, eyes looking up at him.

I had sat down on the one empty spot available and he was watching me on the couch. The sun had barley risen and the lighting was still a bright shade of orange. The clock on the wall read at 7:12 AM.

"Yes?"

"How did you... uh, how'd you organize these?" I say.

"If you wrote it after I met you, it's on the right." He exhales. "I just wanted to understand."

"I'm sorry you had to find out this way." I tell him.

"Are you sorry I found out this way or that I found out at all?"

I don't know how to answer this question. I didn't want Harry to know, just like I didn't want my family to know. I didn't want to be treated like a dying girl, because I'm not.

Asymptomatic CAD was a curse but I was the one in charge, seeing as I didn't really do anything to help myself. It's been my way of handling it, of grasping at the thin strips of hope that my demise would be the one thing I had a say in.

I didn't want my family to think that they weren't enough for me to push on and try a little harder, go to the doctor, get medicated... Take care of myself.

I didn't want them to know my dad died when he did because of our condition, and I really didn't want to talk about how I was the one to find my mother lifeless on the ground, the bottle of my father's pills on the ground right beside her.

No note.

I'd never get to know why my mother did what she did, but she had always said it, she knew she was leaving this life early.

In the end, however, there was no explanation as to why Sara Hale took her life other than loneliness. I could never love her the way she needed and my father wasn't around to. So that's what became of Sara Hale; a body and my father's heart medication in her system.