Page 133 of Old Habits

She lowers to the edge and leans forward, taking deep, gentle breaths with my hand on her back. After a few moments, I ease her closer and she rests her weak head on my shoulder. I feel her shaking in my arms, shivering as if it were freezing cold but her skin is fever warm.

“Jovie, what did Sara do?” I ask.

She raises her head and wipes her nose. “She ran into me at the gas station off the highway — the one I went to purposefully to avoid people who knew me — and she waltzed over just as I was grabbing a pregnancy test off the shelf.”

I frown. “She knew about this?”

“She knew what it could have been. That’s all she needed to tell me to leave town or else she’d drive to my dad’s and tell him everything she saw. Told me that she wasn’t going to let a whore like me ruin her brother’s life.”

It’s almost unbelievable. My own sister. My best friend. But Sara’s hatred for Jovie was always there, boiling beneath the surface, constantly urging me to dump her and find someone better. She would have taken any excuse to drive Jovie out of town. And she succeeded.

I swallow my rage. It can wait.

“When I walked back outside,” Jovie continues, “I saw her slip a note under my windshield wiper before driving off. I went closer and saw it was a check for a thousand dollars with the words ‘get rid of it’ written on it.” She shakes her head. “I cashed it but I never spent a dime. I slipped it into the mailbox of some church out in St. Louis. Just… didn’t feel right to keep it.”

I stand to pace the room, cursing the sparks in my feet. They urge me to act. They want to run and kick and destroy something — anything at all — that will make me feel better about this. I could have been there. I should have been there but I couldn’t act on something I didn’t know about.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, struggling to keep calm.

“I thought you hated me.” She clears her cheeks. “Hell, you practically said as much.”

“I was angry but I would have listened if you’d have just told me.”

“Would you?” She tilts her head. “New Will would have listened but do you really think old Will would have been so rational?”

I pause, struck cold.

“You wanted to get married,” she says. “You would have wanted that baby even though we had no business being parents back then. I wasn’t ready. You weren’t ready but you loved this town, this culture—”

“I loved you.”

“But I didn’t fit. You must, at least, have the hindsight to see that much.”

“You were different.” I shrug. “You still are. That didn’t matter to me.”

“And yet… you dumped me for not instantly waving my hands and screaming yes after that proposal.”

I fall silent again, my guts churning as the truth wrecks me. That entire night plays in my head. Valentine’s Day. The proposal. The immediate fight afterward.

And the heart-to-heart with Sara the next morning.

She’s the one who told me to leave Jovie.

And I listened.

“Ultimately,” Jovie says, “I left so you could have the life that I failed to give you.”

We made a lot of mistakes. We should have done a million things differently back then. But I will not let her believe that she failed me. Not even for a moment.

“You didn’t fail, Jovie,” I say, choking on the lump in my throat. “You can’t think of it like that.”

She bites her cheek, fighting tears. “Stop.”

“No.” I kneel in front of her, trying to meet her eye-line but she looks away. “Jovie, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Stop it,” she says again.

I cup her face, forcing her to look my way but she clenches her eyes closed. “It wasn’t your fault.”