She twisted her head to look at me. “No, he did.”
Then Reeve hadn’t lied.
“Oh. He did,” I confirmed, trying my best to recover from the false alarm. Why was it so hard for me to trust him? I hated that I always assumed the worst where he was concerned. As if proving any of those assumptions true would change how I felt about him.
She nodded as she took another drag. “Just, that wasn’t really that bad. I mean, it was. I wanted to kick him in the balls for it.” Her eyes narrowed. “In fact, I think I did that too.” She exhaled and smiled, as if enjoying the memory.
I drew my knees up to my chest and hugged them, uncomfortable with how it felt to hear her talk about Reeve. More specifically, her and Reeve.
She sat up and crushed the butt of her cigarette against a roof tile. “But he wasn’t malicious. He didn’t do it out of cruelty. He did it because he loved me, and he didn’t want to let me go, and, yeah, it pissed me off, but I didn’t feel like I needed to be rescued.” She tossed the butt over the side of the house.
I swallowed a chiding remark about littering and asked instead, “Then why?”
She hesitated, her attention elsewhere. My eyes followed her gaze to her shoes – my shoes, rather. Her whole outfit had been borrowed from my closet.
And while I was marveling at how convenient it was that we’d always worn the same size, she said, “I called that day because I’d been thinking about not living anymore.”
My breath caught as I realized what she was saying.
“I’d been thinking about it a lot. And, at the time, I thought you were the only person who’d maybe be able to talk me out of it.” She glanced at me and grinned, as though that could lessen the severity of what she’d just said.
But it didn’t in the least.
“Oh, my God, Amber, no.” I had no other words than those. Even with years of acting under my belt, I couldn’t improvise anything better. Because I’d never played this role before. I’d never in a million years imagined that I’d be on this side of a suicide conversation. With Amber, of all people.
Was this why she loved it up here so much? Had she stood up here, alone, trying to get the courage to step off the edge? Was she still thinking about it now? My mind flooded with worry while my body tensed with panic.
“Please. Don’t.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t make it melodramatic. It wasn’t like that. I just…” She trailed off, and although she was silent for only a few seconds, the weight of them made it feel three times as long. “I don’t know. Being trapped here gave me a lot of time to think, I guess. A lot of time for introspection. And I started to think what’s the point? I was broaching thirty and had nothing to show for my life. I saw how far you’d come —”
“Hardly,” I interrupted, mortified that she would have looked to my bland, empty life as a model of comparison.
But she ignored me, raising her voice to make sure I didn’t speak over her again. “— while I was still living off someone else’s handouts. No friends. No family. No one to miss me if I were gone.”
“I would have missed you!” My throat was thick and my eyes watery. “I missed you every day.” It was such a relief to finally say that to her. Like it had been a shameful secret that I’d carried for years and now I was at the day of reckoning.
“And not just me. You had Reeve. He wanted to marry you.” My voice caught, and I hated that it hurt to say that even now, when my sole focus should have been on comforting her. “How could you say you had no one?”
“He wanted kids.” She said it as if that were an obvious explanation.
“So? You’d have kids.” And somewhere in the back of my brain I thought, Oh, he wants kids and God, do I want kids too? With him?
Amber shook her head. “I can’t.”
I furrowed my brow trying to decipher if she really meant can’t or if instead she meant won’t.
“I can’t have kids,” she said again. “I’ve been checked out. I did too much damage to my uterus. Too many terminated pregnancies. And I can’t have them.” She gave a weak laugh. “Ironic how I did everything to not get pregnant before and now I’d do anything…”
She took a deep breath then let it out. “It wasn’t fair to take that from Reeve just because I’d been reckless with my past.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face not sure if I wanted to cry or scream. Or laugh. Knowing that whatever I did, this wasn’t going to end well. It was one thing to claim Reeve as mine when she’d left him because they were wrong for each other, and quite another when she’d left him because she loved him.
It was unfair. And, irrationally, it felt somewhat spiteful.
Or maybe I was the one full of spite.
Steepling my fingers, I pressed them against my lower lip. “Did you talk to him about this?”
“No. I would have rather died.” Her eyes met mine. “So I called you.”
“Amber…” A thousand words died on my tongue before I managed, “I wish I’d been there for you.” But, selfishly, I didn’t really wish that at all. If she had reached me when she’d called, I wouldn’t have had to go looking for her. I wouldn’t have found Reeve. And while knowing him – loving him – might be the death of both Amber and myself, it was an end I would walk toward with my head held high.
“It all worked out okay,” she said in a halfheartedly reassuring tone. “He let me go, and then I ran to Micha. Which was just as cowardly, and, in many ways, just as suicidal. Especially if he decides he isn’t done with me.”