We’ve been driving for twenty minutes and part of me thinks he’s just messing with me. The really dark part of my brain starts living some horror movie fantasy—the one where this pleasant drive ends with me in a duffle bag and Brandon having been some serial killer all along. I know that’s not going to happen, but he is acting really strange. I expected him to maybe yell at me, or tell me to get away from him, or even to ignore me, but I never saw an uncomfortable, silent drive to who-knows-where in my future when I left the house this morning.

We’re a town over, in a quaint little residential part of the neighboring area. I’ve been here before, passing through, but I’ve never stopped. It’s a cute area, lot of stores and public parks, and there are young couples with kids all over the place. I don’t know why we’re here, but Brandon puts on his right-hand signal and pulls to the side in front of an old apartment building and puts the car in park. “We’re here,” he says. “Come with me.”

I’m still getting the horror movie vibe from the way he says that without even looking at me, and without bothering to explain where we are or what we’re doing here. I get out and wait on the corner for him to come around the other side of the car. He waves at me to follow him into the apartment complex. It’s a nice but nondescript building, about ten floors high, with cool, modern architectural styles on the outside. It looks like the kind of place I might live if I were a few years younger and needed a nice bohemian apartment in an up-and-coming part of town.

I follow Brandon without question because I trust him. I trust him more than maybe anyone I know. I don’t think he’s actually going to harm me. I think that he has something to tell me or show me, and this is his way of doing it. I owe it to him to see how this is going to unfold. We get in the elevator and he pushes the button for the sixth floor, still not a word spoken since we got out of the car. The ding signals the opening of the elevator, and we make a sharp left, down a long hallway until we’re standing outside of room 612. I finally decide to ask, “Where are we?”

“You’ll see in a minute.”

I’m expecting him to knock on the door, or to ring the bell, but instead he takes a key from his keychain and puts it in the lock. Is this his place? I’ve never seen his apartment before. We always either meet somewhere, or chill at my place. He’s stayed over a few times, but he’s never invited me over or told me about where he lives. That suddenly strikes me as really strange, even though we’ve been dating a little while.

The door opens to a fully furnished apartment. It’s small, but nice. “Come in,” he says, and I follow him inside. I hear the door close behind me as I take a few more steps inside. The first thing I notice as I scan the room is that it has a decidedly female touch to it. It doesn’t exactly scream bachelor pad. There aren’t piles of clothes lying around, or dirty dishes filling the sink. Even the décor is obviously more female than male to me—everything from the patterns on the upholstery, to the type of art hanging on the walls.

I turn around and he’s standing behind me, his face drawn and pale, his eyes sad. I’m going through a thousand scenarios in my head, but nothing is making sense. I really wish he’d stop all this and start talking to me. Whatever he needs to tell me he needs to tell me now or I’m going to. . .

“Why don’t you have a look around,” he tells me.

“Brandon, I know that I’m not in a position right now to say anything bad, but you’re being super weird, and I . . .”

“It’s over there that I want you to see. In the bedroom on the right. Trust me. I don’t mean to be weird. I just need to show you so that you understand.”

His words are cryptic, but his tone is sincere, and I can give him another few minutes of this odd experiment to see what’s going on. I turn around and walk down the hallway and into the bedroom. I step inside, Brandon following me in and hitting the light switch so that we can see. He opens the shades, letting in enough sunlight for me to see. It’s a woman’s bedroom, clearly well-kept, and very clean. I walk over to the side of the bed and stand by the edge. On the nightstand next to me there’s a picture frame. When I look over I see a family—two older parents, a younger girl who looks like she’s in her twenties, and Brandon. It’s then that I realize where I am. Oh my God, this. . .

“This is where it happened,” he says. “Right there.” He’s pointing at the bed and he looks more emotional than he did when we first came in. “This is where she died.”

“This is your sister, Alexa’s apartment, isn’t it?” He nods his head, and all of a sudden, I don’t need him to say anything else. I don’t know how I know what he’s going to tell me, but before he even speaks to me I give him a hug. I feel his body shaking as he sobs, and then he stops himself, as if he’s embarrassed. I know the rest of this story without it even being told. “How did she do it?”

He pulls away from me so that he can talk, and then he sits on the bed, next to the picture of his family. “The time she was successful it was pills. A whole bottle. She waited until she knew I’d be out for a while. I still remember saying goodbye to her. I didn’t realize that I was saying goodbye forever.” He starts sobbing again, almost uncontrollably. I’m not sure what to do except to hold him, even though he’s so much bigger than me. The wail he lets out is something so painful that I suddenly forget everything that happened between us, and I forget all of my own pain. All I want to do is comfort him right now.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I say, holding him as tightly as I can. “You don’t have to tell me about this if it’s too painful. I understand.”

“No,” he says, getting his composure back for a second. “You don’t. Not entirely.” He sits up and gets a tissue from the bedside. We sit in silence for what seems like a minute, and when he’s gotten himself together he starts to tell me everything. “I realized this morning that I wasn’t really angry with you last night. I mean, I was—I still am on some level, at least that you would lie to me like that.”

“Brandon, I. . .”

“Let me finish. I’m a little angry about your lie, but really what the whole situation did was remind me of my own guilt. And I have a lot of it.”

“Guilt about what?”

“For starters, I lied to you, too. When I met you, I told you I was buying that stupid book for my sister. God, how fucked up was that? I think in my own crazy mind I was actually telling you the truth. My twisted version of it, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever since Alexa died I’ve been collecting books. Self-help, books on mental illness, even fiction that deals with the subject. Anywhere I go where there’s a bookstore I pick one up and read it, cover to cover.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I don’t even know. Maybe it’s my way of learning from my own mistakes. Learning about the disease that took my sister from me. Trying to learn what I could have done to help her. Maybe I just like torturing myself, I don’t know.” As I listen to him I literally feel his pain. I start to imagine him, sad and lonely after his sister’s suicide, collecting books and reading them in his place. It makes me want to cry. “Like keeping this place. Just another form of torture.”

“You pay the rent on this apartment?” I ask.

“For the past four years. Not alone, though, I could never afford the rent on two places. My parents send me a check every month on the first of the month. We haven’t actually spoken since the funeral.”

“What?” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I thought my family was screwed up. Here I was, pissing and moaning over my own situation, assuming that Brandon was from this perfect family because he’s such a great person, but I guess you never really know someone’s situation. “Your parents haven’t spoken to you in four years?”

“The last thing they said to me at the funeral was, ‘I can’t believe you let this happen.’”

Holy shit. I want to wrap my arms around him again and make him feel better, but I don’t have magic hands like him. I don’t have electricity that cures things in my hands like he does. I just have poison. “Brandon, I don’t even know what to say right now.”

“I know I’m throwing a lot at you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be weird, but when I saw you show up today I knew that there was no way to just blurt this all out over coffee. I had to show you, and I had to apologize to you.”

“Apologize to me? Brandon, no.”

“I get it, you lied. I’m not mad about that. I’m mad at myself. You were just trying to start up a conversation that related to me. Your lie was innocent. Mine was worse. Much worse. You invented a person in your lie—I resurrected the dead.”

I’m not even sure where to go with all of this. There’s so much to unpack here—about Brandon and me, about him and his family, about his own feelings of guilt. I don’t even know if I’m equipped to help him, but I know that I’m going to try. “Why do you keep this place?”

“To remember her. To remember my own mistakes as a brother. To repent.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, Talia. I’m glad that you don’t. The kind of guilt that comes with a loved one taking their own life is indescribable. Literally. There are no words, no metaphors, no series of sentences I could string together to make you understand what it does to a person to know that they couldn’t stop a loved one from killing themselves. So, I guess part of me thinks that I deserve to be punished, to be reminded of what could have been. I need to pay for my sins.”

It’s crazy to hear him talking like this. His guilt is so bad that he’s behaving in weird and terrible ways just to make sure his wounds never heal. This was the last thing I would have expected when we were driving over here. But I need to be here for him as much as I can. I start to think of comforting words, if those even exist. I run through a series of sentences in my head, all of them variations on a theme—it’s not your fault, you couldn’t have stopped this, don’t feel guilty. Generic and stupid. Lines you’d read in one of the books he collects. Useless frippery. I know what needs to be said, only this time I don’t hesitate at all.

“When I was twenty-three I tried to kill myself.”

There.

I’ve never said that out loud. It’s never been spoken about. It’s my real dirty little secret.

“What?” He looks at me with complete disbelief in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

Now it’s time for the truth. The whole truth. Whatever happens to him and me from here doesn’t matter. Maybe we’re too messed up to be together. Maybe we’re the answers to each other’s worst nightmares. I have no idea. All I know is that deep in my heart I love Brandon, and more than wanting him to know that, he needs to know that he’s not alone.

“At my mom’s house, no less. That’s when things started to go really bad for us. She wasn’t ever that bad or that cruel when I was growing up, she just never understood me—never understood the kind of. . . issues that I suffer from. In fairness, it was more of a cry for help attempt. If I’d truly wanted to die I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now, I’d be in the ground like my Nana.”

“Talia. . . why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“That I suffer from depression? That I have anxiety so bad sometimes that I can’t leave the house? Because I was ashamed. Because I didn’t want you to think I was some crazy girl. Because I don’t really know how to accept who I am.”

Now it’s his turn to look at me sympathetically. I have to laugh at the irony of this situation. It’s a dark laugh. “Why are you smiling?”

“Not because I’m happy, or because this is funny, but just think about how strange this is. We met over a book about mental health that we each wanted to read. We both lied to each other right from the start because we were embarrassed about our pasts, but we probably are the two people in the world most equipped to understand what the other has gone through on some level. Think about how crazy that is.”

He does. He stops and thinks. Maybe hearing me say it like that brings it into focus for him. But it’s true. It’s the plot of a movie, only it was real. “I have a million questions for you,” he says.

“Ditto.”

“Not here, though.”

“No,” I repeat, agreeing with that decision one hundred percent. “Definitely not here. But I’m glad you brought me. I’m glad we’ve finally been honest with each other.”

“Me, too. I’m fucking exhausted right now.”

“That makes two of us. Take me home. We can talk there.”

“Okay.”

He sounds deflated. I can’t say I blame him. We’ve had about forty-eight hours of drama, and all I want to do is fall on my face and sleep for a week. But right now, there’s a conversation to be had. Both of us owe the other some explanations. I just hope that we still have an ‘us’ when those explanations are done.