“Are you trying to get me arrested? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Her eyes watered before tears were rolling down her cheeks and over my hand, and her body stopped trying to get away from the wall and me. Releasing her mouth, I instantly wished I hadn’t when she opened it. “That’s what you deserve! That’s what murderers deserve! You didn’t have to pay for what you did to Tate! You didn’t care!”

“You think—you think I don’t f**king care? You think I’m not paying for what happened on a daily basis? I feel like I’m dying because of what happened to Tate. I will pay for it, and grieve for him, every day of my life. But you saying this, you using what happened against me, has got to stop, Liv! You are killing me more every time you blame me. I blame myself enough!”

“Until you’re dead too, it will never be enough!” she sobbed. “I wish it’d been you instead of him!”

My arms dropped like deadweight, and she moved away from me seconds before I stumbled back and slid down the wall opposite where I’d had her.

I wish it’d been me too.

My eyes glazed over, and a strangled cry worked its way up my throat. Pulling my knees up, I rested my elbows on them and covered my face as I once again wished for my son to still be here. To be able to hold him one more time.

I was still sitting there sometime later, my head back on the wall, my legs sprawled out on the floor, when Olivia was suddenly sitting on my lap.

“Get. Off. Me.”

“Let me take it all away, Brody. I’ll make it better.”

I grabbed her bare shoulders and pushed her back and to the side until she was off my lap. “All I want that has to do with you is to get you help. You are sick. There is something wrong with you. Let me get you the help you need.”

“I know what will help me.” Her hand snaked out toward my lap, but I stopped her advance.

“You need doctors,” I growled and looked over at her. I was surprised to see her face cleared of the cupcake, not surprised she was still naked. “A shit ton of them. You have to know that, and you have to realize I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need help,” she said with a confident voice.

“You do.” I stood up and took a couple steps toward my room before looking back at her. “And I’m not stopping until I get it for you.”

11

Brody

June 16, 2015

RESTING MY ELBOWS on the counter, I let my head fall into my hands as I waited for the coffee to finish brewing the next morning. I’d barely gotten any sleep as thoughts of Olivia’s behavior went through my mind over and over again. Something wasn’t adding up, and a part of me was getting ready to just give up on trying to get her help.

Her mood swings were off the charts. I had never thought too much about the fact that she’d always gone back to being her normal self when we were out in public until the night she’d threatened to kill herself. Coming home to find her perfectly fine and telling her father that she was afraid of me was what had me looking deeper into every encounter with her.

No bipolar or depression case was the same, I knew that. But whatever Olivia had been suffering from over the last several years couldn’t be defined as any one thing. What was going on with her was both everything and, at the same time, nothing. Unfortunately, I’d overlooked this paradox until now. And now I was beginning to notice the weird patterns in Olivia’s brand of crazy.

I’d wanted to get her help when I thought her reaction to Tate’s death was the same as any normal mother would have, but now it had changed into something else entirely. With the inconsistencies in her behavior, and the brief flashes of the scheming girl I’d known so well in high school, suddenly I was no longer so sure I wanted to get her help. Had she just been playing a game with me to see how far she could push me? And had it taken me this long to catch on to what she was up to? She was constantly telling me she didn’t need help, and I was beginning to wonder whether that was true. Was Liv just being Liv, someone who didn’t need a goddamn thing from anyone other than her dad’s money? If she was still the old Olivia I’d fallen for in high school, she was just putting on an act and then sitting back and enjoying the show.

I straightened and breathed out heavily when those thoughts went through my head again. She can’t be playing a game. She can’t be faking grief over Tate’s death, I told myself for the hundredth time since last night.

I was so confused, so torn . . . and such a f**king dick. I wanted to be with Kamryn so bad that I was now making up excuses for Liv’s behavior so I could justify leaving her without getting her help first.

The house phone rang, jolting me from the inner scolding, and I turned to grab it from the counter. I ground my teeth when the name I’d briefly seen on the caller ID registered, but I’d already pushed TALK.

“Hello?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“How are you today, Mr. Reynolds?” I asked as I turned to walk out of the kitchen and toward Liv’s side of the house.

There was a pause before he huffed. “We don’t do small talk, Brody. Put my daughter on the phone and tell me why she wasn’t answering her cell.”

I rolled my eyes and suppressed a huff of my own. “I’m not sure, you can ask her when you talk to her. Liv,” I called out as I walked down the hallway.

Letting my arm drop so I wouldn’t have to play nice with my father-in-law anymore, I called out her name two more times as I let myself into her room and looked around for her. Rounding the corner into her bathroom, I froze for two seconds before I ran to where she was lying on the floor.