Nigel talked more in those sessions than I’d ever heard him talk in twenty years. About the swing. About Ohio. About his mother crying in the kitchen. About every anniversary when he’d opened his mouth to tell me and closed it again.
I talked too. About the dark. About the Christmas when I threw the book across the room. About the hallway lockers and the pity voices and my mother dying.
About how I’d never once, in thirty-eight years, let myself be angry at the boy who pushed me. Because he was a kid. Because it was an accident. Because being angry wouldn’t bring my eyes back.
“And now?” Dr. Abernathy asked.
I looked at Nigel, sitting at the other end of her little couch.
“Now I get to be angry,” I said. “And I get to be grateful. At the same time. At the same person.”
