Losing Grip

Chapter 34➷ Give Him a Call and Ask Him to Get His Act Together

I made a series of terrible decisions that very afternoon.

For one, I walked out of the coffee shop shortly after Dad gave what he seemed to think was a reasonable explanation. "Heart failure," he had said, staring at his fingers intertwined on the table instead of looking up at me. "Ten months before the accident, she got diagnosed with a heart disease and—"

"Ischemic Heart Disease," Mom cut in, and Dad nodded. "It's a coronary artery disease."

"She didn't experience the symptoms until much later after she developed it, according to her doctor. We tried everything. She even had this, uh, surgery procedure—"

"Angioplasty," Mom interrupted him. I scowled at her, annoyed at her repeated mentions of terms I could not care for at the moment and that I would probably forget two minutes later.

"Right," Dad said. "We thought the surgery worked because she was okay for a while, but then—"

This time, I had been the one to interrupt him. "Surgery?" I repeated, scoffing in disbelief, as I tried to hold on to the denial that would make sense of this entire conversation. "That's impossible. I would have known."

Even as I said that, some specific scenes flashed in my mind. When she would leave our room any time she was stressed; when she would place her hands over her chest, as to calm it down after laughing too much. When she would rest on the grass at the park, and her skin would pale after skipping around and running.

"You look sick," I would joke, and her eyes would snap open.

"What? No, I don't," she would answer defensively. "I'm just tired."

And I believed her. Of course, I believed her.

"The week-long senior class trip last year, in December?" Dad asked. "She made that up so that you wouldn't know."

Our school had never done anything like this before, so why did I even believe it? Maybe because I would have never thought that she could lie to me.

Riley Taylor didn't do lies, and her honesty was the one thing I thought I could rely on.

"What made it worse," Dad continued. He was oblivious to the fact that everything that I had so neatly organized in my mind—everything that I held as truth—was now crashing down to a disgusting mess.

"What made it worse," he repeated, "was that we didn't discover it in time. The sports. The intense physical activities. Her tendency to stress about everything. Her upbeat energy. They all played a role in making her condition much more advanced by the time we learned about it. I know you weren't listening to whatever the doctor was saying that day, but she mentioned that Riley's heart failed from the stress of the impending accident long before the truck hit her."

Dad had continued to go on about it, but I had blocked his words way earlier. All I could think about was that she hadn't told me about one of the most important things that she had been experiencing.

"You're my best friend, Avery," she had said, looking over her shoulder with a reassuring smile. "We tell each other everything."

Everything.

Everything. The word echoed through my head, deafening my ears to whatever Dad and Mom were now saying.

I jumped off my stool, nearly tripping over as my legs met the ground. I was sure they stared at me as I stepped away from our table, but I couldn't see them. I couldn't see anything. I needed air, and I knew I wouldn't get it in here.

Perhaps listening to all this had been my first bad decision that day, but it was definitely not the worst one.

Because as I walked out of the café after wrestling blindly with the door, I thought I knew what I needed. I thought I knew exactly what would kill the voice in my mind that repeated that one word, Everything, over and over again in a terrifying and never-ending loop.