“He didn’t leave a note?” Lani’s voice was hushed. “There weren’t any warning signs?”
“Oh, in hindsight there were things, but they were things that never struck us as out of the ordinary or were easily explained away by puberty or teenage angst. When he died, he didn’t leave a note, no explanation at all.”
“How long ago?”
“Eleven years.”
With a bitter snort, Lani put her mug down with a muffled clink. “You seem so much farther along than I am, Maura, and he was your child, not just—”
“Not just a brother?” Maura said gently when she didn’t go on. “Like you’re not allowed to grieve because he’s not someone you gave birth to?”
Lani shrugged and twisted her fingers together. God, she wished she was anywhere but here.
“After Tyler died, my parents seemed to forget I existed,” she said. “All the focus was on them. Everyone kept telling me to be strong for them, to be there for them, since I was the only kid they had left.”
“The forgotten mourners.” Nodding, Maura sipped her tea. “I’ve heard that a lot from sibling survivors. I was guilty of it myself with my own surviving children.” A spasm of pain crossed her face. “It’s taken years to repair that damage.”
Maura’s openness chased away a little more of Lani’s tension. She picked up her tea again. “So how do we do this therapy thing?”
With a smile, Maura said, “Well, we just keep on doing what we’ve been doing. We can talk about stuff that’s bothering you, stuff you’d like to get off your chest. I’m here for you, Lani.”
A short silence fell, broken only by the clink of cup hitting saucer. Maura sat relaxed, one leg crossed over the other, her legal pad casually open on her lap.
Lani’s eyes went to Vincent in his uniform again, and she bit her lip.
“Lani?” Maura’s voice was soft, encouraging. “What are you thinking about?”
“My ex.”
“What about him?”
“He’s military, too. Air Force special ops.”
“A pararescueman?” When Lani nodded, Maura went on. “He must’ve been gone a lot.”
“He was. All the time.”
“Is that why you broke up?”
“No.” To her horror, Lani felt tears sting her eyes. “We broke up because all I did was let him down.”
“What do you mean? How did you let him down?” There was no judgment in Maura’s tone, only gentle inquiry.
“Because I couldn’t cope.”
“With what?”
“With everything,” Lani said harshly. “With his absences, the things he tried to share with me—”
She broke off, unable to go on. After a beat of silence, Maura said, “About what he saw on deployment?”
“That, and—and about my brother. Rhys is the one who found him.”
“Oh.” There was a wealth of understanding in that one breathed word. “Tell me.”
Lani did, about hearing the gunshot, about Rhys rushing downstairs and then back up, how he’d refused to let her go see, too.
“He called the cops, and when they got there, they handcuffed us and treated us like criminals.”
Maura winced. “That’s actually standard procedure. They need to ascertain it’s not a murder made to look like a suicide.”
“My parents fell apart. They blamed me—”
“Why do you think they blamed you?”
Lani grit her teeth as the memories clawed to the surface. “Because I’m the one who missed all the warning signs. Everything.”
“Like what?”
Plopping her cup down on the table again, she clasped her trembling hands between her knees. “He’d quit his job out of the blue. He said ‘Fuck Dad’ when I knew he idolized our father. His eyes were distant and sad.”
“And did the thought ever cross your mind, even for one minute, that he was going to kill himself?”
“No!” Lani gasped. “Oh, my God, no! If it had, I would have—”
“You would’ve done everything in your power to stop him,” Maura said softly. “But you didn’t know.”
“I should have—”
“You. Didn’t. Know. You cannot accept responsibility for that.”
The last of Lani’s tenuous control slipped away. “Yes, I can,” she shouted. “I was the last one to see him alive. I could have stopped him! Don’t tell me I couldn’t have.”
Leaping to her feet and grabbing up her purse, she strode toward the door, her whole body shaking with a combination of rage and confusion. Therapy was supposed to be helping, not ripping her skin off layer by layer.
“How do you know you didn’t?”
The quiet words stopped her in her tracks. “What?” She dashed the back of her hand over her cheeks. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“How do you know there weren’t other times you did stop him? Something you said, something you did?”
Lani could only stand frozen, her sobbing breaths loud in the room. She remembered coming into the living room once to find Tyler sitting in the dark, staring into space, and she’d cajoled him up and into the dining room where Rhys and Aaron were raiding the fridge. They’d all ended up playing cards for hours, and while Tyler was quieter than usual, he’d seemed to enjoy himself.
Had she stopped him that night? Had she bought him a little more time? Tears stung her eyes as the realization slammed into her: Even if she had, it didn’t change the ultimate outcome, because a week later he was gone. That meant...
“That’s right. There wasn’t anything you could have done.” Lani’s gaze snapped to Maura, who was looking at her steadily. “You, my friend, have taken the weight of the world on your shoulders, haven’t you?” She got up from her chair and walked toward her. “You’re supposed to be all-seeing, all-knowing, a mind reader at fourteen years old.”
The hot tears overflowed and streamed down Lani’s cheeks.
“You’re supposed to be the perfect girlfriend to a man who has a dangerous, stressful job that takes him away from home for months at a time. You’re never, ever supposed to be human, not ever, because that’s letting him down.”
Slipping her arm around her shoulders, Maura led her back to the couch. “Because you failed to keep Tyler alive, you must be a failure at everything, right? Especially impending motherhood.”