It Ends with Us

window and helped him inside and he took me in his arms and held me there for so
long while I cried.
He smelled so good. I could tell when I hugged him that he’d put on some much-
needed weight in just the six weeks since I’d last seen him. He pulled back and
wiped the tears off my cheeks. “Why are you crying, Lily?”
I was embarrassed that I was crying. I cried a lot that month—probably more
than any other month of my life. It was probably just the hormones of being a
teenage girl, mixed with the stress of how my father treated my mother, and then
having to say goodbye to Atlas.
I grabbed a shirt from the floor and dried my eyes, then we sat down on the bed.
He pulled me against his chest and leaned against my headboard.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“It’s your birthday,” he said. “And you’re still my favorite person. And I’ve
missed you.”
It was probably no later than ten o’clock when he got there, but we talked so
much, I remember it was after midnight the next time I looked at the clock. I can’t

---

even remember what all we talked about, but I do remember how I felt. He seemed so
happy and there was a light in his eyes that I’d never seen there before. Like he’d
finally found his home.
He said he wanted to tell me something and his voice grew serious. He readjusted
me so that I was straddling his lap, because he wanted me to look him in the eyes
when he told me. I was thinking maybe he was about to tell me he had a girlfriend or
that he was leaving even sooner for the military. But what he said next shocked me.
He said the first night he went to that old house, he wasn’t there because he
needed a place to stay.
He went there to kill himself.
My hands went up to my mouth because I had no idea things had gotten that
bad for him. So bad that he didn’t even want to live anymore.
“I hope you never know what it’s like to feel that lonely, Lily,” he said.
He went on to tell me that the first night he was at that house, he was sitting in
the living room floor with a razor blade to his wrist. Right when he was about to use
it, my bedroom light went on. “You were standing there like an angel, backlit by the
light of heaven,” he said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”
He watched me walk around my bedroom for a while. Watched me lie on the bed
and write in my journal. And he put down the razor blade because he said it’d been
a month since life had given him any sort of feeling at all, and looking at me gave
him a little bit of feeling. Enough to not be numb enough to end things that night.
Then a day or two later is when I took him the food and set it on his back porch.
I guess you already know the rest of that story.
“You saved my life, Lily,” he said to me. “And you weren’t even trying.”
He leaned forward and kissed that spot between my shoulder and my neck that he
always kisses. I liked that he did it again. I don’t like much about my body, but that
spot on my collarbone has become my favorite part of me.
He took my hands in his and told me he was leaving sooner than he planned for
the military, but that he couldn’t leave without telling me thank you. He told me
he’d be gone for four years and that the last thing he wanted for me was to be a
sixteen-year-old girl not living my life because of a boyfriend I never got to see or hear
from.
The next thing he said made his blue eyes tear up until they looked clear. He