My One Night: An On My Own Novel by Carrie Ryan (life books to read .txt) 📕

“And I’d be broken right alongside her,” my dad added. This time, the tears flowed freely down my face.

I choked, my body shaking. “All of this was because you love me?”

“Yes. And we were wrong. We’re not going to push you like we have been. We’re going to do whatever we can to make up for the choices we made when it came to you. We will always trust the choices you make, even if we question them because…we do have some experience with some things.”

“I don’t understand,” I said again. “You guys were so mean.”

“And we were idiots,” my mom said, throwing up her hands. “Stupid idiots who thought we knew best. Maybe we do in some things, but not everything. I’ll listen now. I promise I will. But don’t push me away. Don’t push us away. Let us be part of your life. Corinne’s parents will never get to hold their daughter again, and I don’t know what I would do if I never got to hold you. If you walked away forever and we didn’t have you in our lives. I’m sorry that we lost so much time. That we were such horrible people. But I love you, Elise.”

“I love you, too. So fucking much,” my dad said, and I blinked at the vulgarity. Dad never cursed in front of me. I hadn’t been sure he knew how.

“Maybe we should get to know you as an adult, rather than the little girl in our heads.”

I looked at my mother, so confused, and it felt like my heart kept breaking over and over again. Shattered into a thousand pieces where I knew it could never be glued together with any type of emotion or connection.

“I just want you to be happy, and I don’t know how we can make that happen. But we’ll always be here. Even if we make mistakes again, we’ll atone for them. We’ll do something.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can think about any of that right now. But I don’t want you to atone for anything. Corinne doesn’t have any more time, and I don’t want to lose time wondering what if and what we lost. I just want things to go back to normal. Or a new normal where you guys are proud of me, and Corinne is still here, making me laugh and giving me dares and telling me truths.”

“Dares and truths?” my mom asked.

I shook my head. “It’s a long story.”

Mom squeezed my hand, and Dad came closer.

He cleared his throat. “I’d love to hear it, if you think we have time.”

I looked at my parents. I knew that Corinne was never coming back. As much as I wanted her to be here, she couldn’t come back. Rationally, I knew that I couldn’t have saved her, that no matter how fast I was, I would never be fast enough to stop an aneurysm.

But I couldn’t get over it in a blink. I didn’t know if that would ever happen.

Somehow, I would have to find a way to breathe again.

I just didn’t know how to do that.

And so I sat between my parents, and I told them about the dares and the jokes.

We ate lunch, even though I didn’t think I’d be able to, and I cried hard, and they held me close. When we got to Corinne’s final dare, I skated over the truth, but the knowing look in my mother’s eyes said that I hadn’t done it well enough.

“So I take it this dare was Dillon?” Mom asked.

“Are you going to tell us what happened with you and that boy?” my dad asked, sounding very fatherly and not so judge-y.

“It didn’t work out,” I said, shrugging. Nothing about what I felt for Dillon or the thoughts filtering through my mind were casual, but I wasn’t sure I could voice them. Not even to myself.

“When did you break up with him?” my mother asked.

“Why do you think I’m the one who broke up with him?” I was deflecting, and we all knew it.

“When?” Mom asked softly.

“At the wake, because I’m a horrible person.”

My mother shook her head. “We all make terrible decisions in grief. We make big ones, small ones, and a lot of them are terrible. Were you thinking about breaking up with him for a while?”

I shook my head. “Honestly, the only time I thought about it at all before was after our conversation here.”

My mother had the grace to blush, and my dad sighed.

“We’re not used to this whole adult you. And that’s on us.”

“I’m not used to this whole adult me either. But I don’t think I can fix what I broke. I was mean. I said I couldn’t take it anymore, that it was all too much. I told him to go.”

My mother shook her head. “It’s been three days. Has he texted? Because to me, that says you need space, not that it’s over.”

I pressed my lips together and nodded. “He’s texted. Every day, just to check in on me and tell me that I don’t need to respond. But he also said he wanted to hear my voice because he likes the sound of it.”

My mom’s eyes filled with warmth, even as my dad gave me a skeptical look. “Either that boy is in love with you, or he’s using the best lines.”

That made me laugh, and I honestly didn’t think I’d ever be able to laugh again. “Dad.”

My dad shrugged. “What? I was a twenty-something-year-old-boy before. He is twenty-something, right? And not some forty-year-old going back to school?”

I snorted. “He’s a month older than me.”

“Good. We’re going to want to meet him.”

My heart twisted again. “But we’re not together, Dad.”

Mom leaned forward. “I don’t know if that’s quite true. I think you should talk to him.”

“Do you think this is a time for me to make big decisions?” I asked my mother, tossing her words back in her face.

She put a finger in the air, marking it as