I cannot sleep, so instead I tally my losses: Sean isn’t taking my phone calls. My father is getting worse. I’ve got no job. Harper’s roommate returns in a little over a week, and when she does I’ll have nowhere to live and no money with which to acquire something. I’ve sent a few resumes out, but I’ve heard nothing back.

And all of that is minimal compared to the agony of picturing Brendan with that stupid, stupid girl. I know I’m not perfect. I can easily imagine that there are better girls out there than me. Girls who are prettier and smarter and less fucked-up. But she’s not one of them.

Just the image of him with his arm around her waist makes me want to vomit. He never once stood like that with me in public. It’s not even about wanting him back, because that was always a lost cause, always impossible. I just want him to stop breaking my heart. I remember when he told me we were in the bubble. Like a pocket of air in a submerged car, he said. What he didn’t say, and what I should have realized, is that when the bubble is popped you don’t shoot to the surface. You drown.

* * *

I’m still awake at 2 AM, when my mother’s name appears on my phone.

I let it ring once, twice, wondering why I always answer. Why does it have to be me? Why can’t she go find him? Or maybe she could just let him spend a night in jail, allow him to actually see how serious a problem it is.

She calls a second time and a third, and my hand twitches, but I don’t pick up the phone. Maybe I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I’ve had enough. For once in my damn life, I am not going to allow them to add their problems to mine.

I must fall asleep after that, because it seems as if moments later the phone is ringing again, but the clock says it’s just after 4 AM. That’s when I start to panic. She didn’t go find him, and he’s still missing, and I’m a terrible daughter for letting it happen. I know all of this before I ever pick up the phone.

My mother is crying so hard she’s almost incoherent. She tells me my father was in an accident. And then she tells me what I already know: that this is entirely my fault.

* * *

By the time I reach Denver, the sun is coming over the horizon. I’ve only slept two of the past 24 hours, but I feel curiously alert, and curiously empty, all at once.

I enter St. Joseph’s, a hospital I’ve never set foot in before, but it seems familiar—maybe because I’ve pictured this exact scenario so many times. I follow the directory to the elevators down the hall, and am then led by a somber nurse to my father's room.

He looks different. Even if I'd walked into the family room on a regular summer day, if I saw him looking the way he does now, I'd know he was dying. His lips are thin, bleached of color, and his skin is so white it has a blue sheen to it. The veins on his hands stand out like rocky outcroppings across a desert plain.

I press my lips together to keep from making noise, but my mom begins sobbing the moment she sees me, helpless and childlike. For a moment I hate her. I hate her for staying with him for so long, for letting him get to this point, for sitting there blubbering like a lost five-year-old who needs me to come in and fix everything. Just once, I would like to have been the lost five-year-old who got saved.

I pinch my lips tighter, though, and go to her side, taking the seat next to her and letting her collapse on my shoulder. She tells me he ran into a telephone pole, and I silently thank God that it was an inanimate object he hit. It goes without saying that he was drunk.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” she cries. “I called and called.”

I’m not getting into this with her right now. Yes, I blame myself, but I also blame her. She’s never lifted one finger to solve this problem the whole time they’ve been together, so I’m not the only one at fault.

"I don't know what's going on," she says, continuing to weep. "The doctors keep talking about the bleeding and cirrhosis, and it doesn't even make sense.”

I ask the triage nurse to have the doctor stop by our room. It takes over an hour, and when he does walk in, he looks relieved. I imagine he’s glad to find someone besides my mother in the room. She keeps crying and saying "Please just fix him," like my dad's a broken toy.

The doctor tells me my father has a subdural hematoma—bleeding in his brain. Right now they’re watching it, but he’s certain my dad will need surgery.

“So can we get that scheduled?” I ask.

“We’d like to wait, if possible,” he says, “because right now he’s unlikely to survive it. Your father has moderate cirrhosis, which is causing some internal bleeding. The odds of him making it through the surgery, in his current condition, are poor.”

“How poor?” I ask. “50 percent?”

“50 percent,” he replies, “would be extremely optimistic.”

My mother cries again after he leaves. She says the doctor is mean and asks me to get a second opinion. I tell her I’ll handle it, and I convince her to go home to sleep for a while. Once she leaves, I take on the other parental role she abandoned, and I call my brother.

I get a message saying his number is no longer in service.

In movies, when the heroine hits rock bottom, the world seems to right itself. Things turn around.

Except each time I think I’ve hit my rock bottom, I find out I can go lower. I thought my life couldn’t be any worse this time yesterday: unemployed and homeless and broken-hearted. But now my father is dying, my brother is missing, my mother is as helpless and grief-stricken as a child, and it’s on me to fix all of it, when I clearly can’t even take care of myself.

* * *

My mother returns early in the afternoon, though I wish she had not. Her desperation is infectious. Her questions make me feel more overwhelmed and incapable than I already did. She cries and asks me what she’s going to do without him. She cries and asks why I haven’t gotten ahold of Sean, why they ever came to Colorado in the first place. And then again, why I didn’t answer the phone last night.

It’s just after dinner when my father finally opens his eyes. He’s so happy to see me, and also so sad that I can feel my heart cracking in my chest. I’d like to be the one person in this room capable of holding it together, but I can’t do it.

I sit beside him and take his hand.

“I’m sorry, Erin,” he says. “It was just a stupid mistake.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. But it’s not okay, of course. He did this to himself, all of it, and it’s not okay.

“The doctor told you the odds, with the surgery?” he asks. His voice breaks.

I nod, unable to speak.

“I just want to know you’re taken care of,” he pleads. “I just want to know that if I’m going, I don’t need to worry about all of you.”

“You don’t need to worry about any of us,” I promise him. I know as I say it that as soon as this is over, I’ll be taking any shitty marketing job I can find—promoting wealth management or writing cheerful missives to the people Rob’s company will lay off, full of euphemisms about “new opportunities for growth” that will make me cringe with each keystroke. Sean and my mother will be more my responsibility than ever if he doesn’t survive.

“I’m so glad you found Rob,” he says. “He’s a good man. He’ll make sure you’re all cared for. I just wish I could be there to see you married.”

Oh, God. They don’t even know we broke up.

I nod with a deer-in-headlights stare as my mother bounces out of her seat. “You could, Erin! We could find a priest. Maybe Father Duncan or even the hospital chaplain. You could do it right here.”

I blink, unable to tell them the truth at this horrible moment, but unwilling to lie either.

“Would you consider it?” my father asks, squeezing my hand. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not the big fancy thing you probably want, but you could still have that too, later.”

I swallow hard on the lump in my throat. “We’ll see, Daddy. Rob’s not even in the country right now. Let’s talk about it later.”

“Please,” he pleads, “think about it. I’m going to hang on until I can see it. Is Sean on his way?”

Once again, the lies pour from my mouth. “Yes,” I say. “He’s out of state, but he’s driving here now.”

Brendan was right. I am incapable of telling the truth, but the only person who ever knew the truth doesn’t want me, so maybe it’s for the best.

* * *

That night, after my father falls back asleep, I let my mother have the pull-out chair and leave. I’ve been up for nearly 48 hours, and as I walk carefully down the white-tiled hallway, exhaustion makes me feel as if I’ve been adrift at sea for days. Finding Brendan in the waiting room, watching me with his worried eyes, is like finding solid ground. He crosses the room and wraps his arms around me, holding me tight. And though I thought I was too tired to cry, too cried-out to cry, I find that I’m not. I can feel it inside me, rising up.

"What are you doing here?" I whisper.

"Olivia told me," he says. “I didn’t want you dealing with this alone. Are you going home?”

I shake my head. “My parents’ place,” I say, my voice growing choked. In a few days, I may never be able to say those words again. “I want to be nearby.”

“I’ll drive you there.”

“You don’t need—”

“You're not driving there alone, and you’re not staying there alone. You decide you want me gone, I'll go. But not until someone else is there with you."

I mean to argue with him, but instead my shoulders begin to shake, and I cry silently against his chest.

“I didn’t answer the phone last night,” I whisper, finally admitting it aloud. In spite of everything that’s happened, he’s still the only person alive I would be willing to tell. “I saw that my mom was calling, and I was so busy feeling sorry for myself that I let it go to voicemail.”

He pulls me tighter. “You were right to do it. You should have done it a long time ago. This isn’t on you.”

For some reason that just makes me cry harder.

* * *

I don’t remember walking to Brendan’s car or riding to my parents’ condo. I don’t remember any aspect of it until we arrive in the guest room and he lies down, pulling me onto his chest as he drags the quilt over both of us.

I am no longer crying, but I’m also not ready to sleep. My voice punctures the silence. “Why are you here?”

“I didn’t want you going through this alone. I know how your mom is.”

“But why?” I whisper. “The second Rob came back, you treated me like some one-time thing. Like you didn’t even know my name, and it never mattered. So why are acting like you care now?”

He pushes my hair off my face, pressing a thumb to the tear under my eye and wiping it away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so fucking sorry. It just seemed easier that way. I wasn’t going to ask you to sneak around behind his back. And if I can’t give you the things you want, someone should.”

“Why didn’t you at least tell me that? You acted so ambivalent about it.”

“I acted ambivalent because I was pissed, Erin. You think this is easy for me? Every time I hear from Rob, it sounds like you’re back together, or on your way to it. So I was fucking pissed off and being a dick about it. A few hours after you left my place, he’s calling to tell me you’ve got a date that afternoon. I just didn’t know what to do, and I still don’t know what to do, but I’m sorry.”

“What about the girl?” I ask.

“What girl?”

“Crystal. Rob said she was at your place when he came by.”

Brendan gives a low laugh. “I’m not dating anyone. I had to say something to keep him from walking in. You never came back for any of your stuff. It’s all over my apartment.”

“I didn’t want to come get it. I thought it would be too hard, seeing your place. I was hoping you’d just drop it off.”

“And I never dropped it off,” he says, “because then you’d never have a reason to come back.”

“You put your arm around her,” I say, and my voice breaks all over again. “You were willing to let everyone know you were together last night, but you never did that with me.”

“Erin, you were getting back together with Rob, and it’s not like we live in a major city. If we’d been all over each other, what do you think the odds are that it’d eventually get back to him? I was doing it for you, and believe me, it pissed me off every time.”

“But…”

He laughs softly. “Baby, go to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

“One more thing,” I say. “Who kept calling you at night? Was it Gabi?”

He pauses. The silence stretches so long that it seems like a confirmation in and of itself.

“No,” he finally says. “It’s her mom.”