“You okay, Kalamata?” His voice was penitent, which just made me angrier. He’d spent the last week trying to convince me to give my dad a chance, all the while knowing that my dad had been lying. Not to mention he had been lying to me. It must have made for great filming.
I scowled at him. “Where’s your camera?”
My tone was hardly friendly, but he took it as an invitation, closing the door behind him and bounding toward me. “Confiscated. They won’t allow me to film here.” He dragged a chair noisily up next to me, then took a seat. “Not that I would. So,” he said.
I crossed my arms. I wasn’t about to help him out.
We sat in awkward silence, the machine next to me beeping every so often. They’d made me change into a light blue hospital gown, and my bare legs stuck out the bottom. My pedicure was chipped and fading, and who knew what my hair and face looked like, but for once I didn’t care. My breath felt shaky and raggedy in my chest. The air was thick.
Finally, Theo crossed his ankle over his knee, jiggling his foot anxiously. “I’m guessing you have some questions for me?”
Pressure formed in the space between my eyebrows, and my words shot out like arrows from a bow. “Like, how did it feel for you to know that you were lying to me this entire time?”
His mouth dropped open in what looked like genuine surprise. “What? I wasn’t lying to you. Your dad asked me not to tell you. I had to honor his wishes.”
Honor his wishes? I could feel my heart rate increasing, a fact that the machine I was connected to instantly alerted us to.
“Is that okay?” Theo asked, pointing to the screen.
“Ignore it.” I struggled through my wires to sit up, locking eyes with him. “Theo, you’ve spent this entire time trying to convince me what a great guy my dad is and how he’s changed. But this whole time he was lying, and you were too. He brought me here because he’s dying, isn’t he?”
The realization had been lurking under the surface, murky and miserable. He wanted to reconnect because it was his last chance. Meaning, if he weren’t sick, would he have even reached out? The thought made me hurt from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
For once, Theo was quiet, his dark eyes studying me. “He isn’t dying.” But his voice lacked resolve. A part of him was mourning already. I knew that because I was too.
I held up my phone. “But people can only expect to live five or ten years on dialysis. And in the ambulance you said it’s been five years already.”
“Some people live for much longer when it’s going well,” Theo quickly said.
My breath was coming in hot and fast, my fists clenched. Why couldn’t he just tell the truth? “But, Theo, it’s not going well.”
He looked like I’d slapped him, and as I stared at his indignant expression, I realized what I was seeing. Theo was in denial about losing my dad. He’d never experienced the loss of Nico Varanakis. I had. My heart crumpled, this time for him.
He reached for my hand but stopped himself, grabbing the railing on my bed instead. “Kalamata, you can trust me. I didn’t tell you about your dad’s illness because he asked me not to. He didn’t want the trip to be overshadowed by it, or for you to have any extra pressure because he wasn’t well.” He studied me again, this time his mouth twisted. “Are you angry at him for being sick?”
All my soft feelings went up in a puff of smoke. Was I angry at my dad for being sick? Who did Theo think he was? I gripped the sheets tightly, my stomach condensing into a knot.
“No, Theo. I’m angry at him for not telling me what was going on all this time. I’m angry at him for endangering himself and me for some stupid tip about Atlantis. I’m angry at him for deciding to keep me out of his life until the very last second.”
Theo reached for me again, but quickly thought better of it. “But that was the point of this trip. He wanted you here before it was too late, before he was too sick to have this time with you.”
Lava was building in my chest, my heart hammering as I stared at Theo. Yes, the situation was complicated in some ways, but in other ways it wasn’t at all. My dad had brought me back just in time for me to lose him again. If it wasn’t so horrible, it would be funny.
“Theo, it was already too late.” My voice was high-pitched and raggedy, but I couldn’t stop it. Why was no one getting this? Why did no one seem to understand that my dad, the sun I had orbited around, had left me in a darkness that no human should have to endure? Did they really expect me to welcome him back into my life just because this could be my last chance? The time period when my dad and I could have reconciled, formed a new relationship, had passed. The train hadn’t just left the station. It had jumped the tracks and headed for the other side of the world.
I wanted to explain all of that, but what was the point? Yes, a part of me had once thought—hoped—that Theo was someone who could understand the experience of losing my dad. Understand what it was like to have been left with pieces of something that never added up to a whole. But he didn’t. No one had ever understood, and I needed to get used to that.
“Theo, I…” But I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I was too angry, and I knew I’d be saying things I couldn’t take back. Maybe I didn’t want to take them back. But his dark eyes met mine, and I felt a pang in my chest. I’d liked those eyes so much. I’d trusted them. And now that it was all out in the open—yes, I had been falling for those eyes, despite the many, many reasons why I shouldn’t be. It had all been a lie.
He dropped his gaze. “National Geographic doesn’t want the film anymore. They said we don’t have enough original material.”
His words felt so heavy. I didn’t want them to, but they did. It was time to let all of this go. “Well, what did we expect? It’s not like we were actually going to find something.”
Sadness splayed across his face, and I had to fight off the regret. It was true, wasn’t it? “I’m really sorry,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I’d never hurt you. I—I—” And then his eyes locked on to mine, searching for something. Hoping for something. I knew what he wanted because I had wanted it too. And now here we were. “If all this hadn’t happened…” He waved his hand vaguely toward where my dad’s room must be. “Maybe—”
A surge of anger hit my chest. “But it did happen.”
He looked away. We’d been dancing around this for a week now, but the safety I had felt with Theo was slowly drifting. He’d been lying just like my dad had.
“I think you should go.”
I could see the pain physically ripping through him, and I quickly dropped my eyes to his shoulders, trying to ignore the same feeling running through me.
He waited for a moment, his stance begging me to take it back. Ask him to stay. I didn’t.
“Bye, Liv,” he said quietly.
Liv.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. He crossed the room and disappeared out the door. I watched him leave me alone, realizing the truth. You can’t always trust the people you hope you can: they are always going to disappoint you in the end.